Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Study of Teachers’ Questioning Patterns

Classroom discourse studies have been a powerful tool to observe teacher-studentinteractions. Especially, types of the questions posed by the teacher can be very effective forfostering learning and communication. There are those questions which are truly communicative(referential questions) and those which are used as pedagogical tools, often entailing single-wordanswers (display or rhetorical questions). This study aimed to analyze teachers’ questioningpatterns in a communicative context. A language institute classroom was recorded for fivesessions. Then, the recordings were transcribed and scrutinized carefully to investigate theteacher’s question types. The results indicated that a large part of the questions were of displaytype which encourage short answers. Only one third of the questions were of referential typewhich pave the way for genuine communication. Also, the time periods of the class and theteachers’ moment to moment focus on differen

Keywords:

display questions , referential questions , question type