A Study of EFL Teachers’ Beliefs in Questioning Strategy Use in Industrial Vocational Senior High Schools

• Main Authors: Chin-fang Chen, 陳錦芳
• Other Authors: David S. D. Tseng
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/36312430237148188391

碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系 === 100 === This study aimed to explore industrial vocational senior high schools EFL teachers’ beliefs in questioning strategy use. The primary data collecting methods used in the present study were in-depth interviews and classroom observations. First of all, the researcher conducted a pre-observation interview and a post-observation interview with the three industrial vocational senior high school English teachers in central Taiwan. The purpose of the pre-observation interview was to elicit the educational background of these three participant teachers. The post-observation interview was to elicit the three teachers’ beliefs in questioning strategy use. Next, each of the three teachers was observed, audio-taped, and video-taped for two lesson units respectively. The analysis of the collected qualitative data was carried out by coding, categorizing, and interpreting. The major findings were summarized as follows: Firstly, thirteen reasons for teachers’ uses of questioning strategies were identified: (a) previewing the contents of reading, (b) helping students activate their prior knowledge before teaching, (c) increasing students’ comprehension,(d) helping students listen to a full sentence, (e) guiding students to practice finding the points, (f) helping students concentrate on the course, (g) increasing the chances for students to listen to English, (h) increasing the teachers’ amount of English use, (i) helping students memorize easily, (j) making students feel achievement, (k) helping students find grammatical concepts, (l) helping students find the rules from the sentences, and (m) interacting with students. Secondly, the teachers’ beliefs about when they used questioning strategies mainly included the following points of time:(a) teaching vocabulary, (b) teaching the sentence patterns, (c) teaching the reading, (d) teaching reading tests, (e) before teaching the lesson, (f) before drawing lots, (g) checking students’ comprehension, (h) when time is limited, (i) when students keep silent, (j) when students do not understand the question, and (k) when the question is too long. Thirdly, the teachers’ beliefs in the ways in which the teachers tended to use the questioning strategies were mainly through asking synonyms, asking the contents of the reading, repeating the same English sentence, explaining the question in Chinese, simplifying the question to keywords, offering more information and clues of questions, asking wh- questions first and then asking yes/no questions, asking grammar points, giving daily life examples and exemplifying things that students are interested. Fourthly, six purposes for the teachers to use the questioning strategies were identified: classroom managing, known information demanding, comprehension checking, confirmation checking, clarifying requesting, and being rhetorical. Finally, it was also found that the teacher participants in this study appeared to show awareness of the questioning strategy use and realized the effectiveness of these strategies that they used. The present findings contribute to the understanding of the relationship between teacher’s beliefs and classroom practices in questioning strategy use. Based on the findings of the present study, the researcher suggests that teachers should use different questioning strategies to encourage the students to respond when no reply or unexpected answers were given. They should also closely observe students’ reaction to their questions and take it into account when designing the teaching plans.