The Status of Teacher’s Questions and Students’ Responses: The Case of an EFL Class

Abstract

Whereas a lot of classroom research conducted in English classes have studied the role of classroom interaction, a considerable number of research has been concerned with the linguistic aspects of classroom interaction, many of which dealt with the type of questions asked in the EFL classes. Previously it was demonstrated that teachers make adjustments in their questioning techniques when communicating with their students. In the same line of inquiry, the present study tried to find out what techniques of questioning teachers use to engage their students in classroom interaction. The present paper, which is based on a case study, investigates classroom interactions in terms of questions being asked by the teacher. To this end, Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy was selected as the framework of analysis. A class of six adolescent students, who were both male and female, participated in the study. For the purpose of this study, three 45-minute sessions of classroom interactions between the teacher and the participant were randomly tape recorded. After analyzing the obtained data, it was found that the inference question, among different question types, was the most frequently posed question in the target classroom with 27% of occurrence. Based on the obtained results, it is claimed that the study is a contribution to the characterization of teacher-student interactions. Moreover, some suggestions for further research are presented.