Teachers questioning techniques:A Qualitative Study

One of the aspects of teaching, which is always the center of attention, is the techniques teachers utilize in teaching and the consecutive interactions to achieve their appealed objectives, mainly in EFL and ESL classes. This study looked at questioning strategies from the perspective of the interactions they made among the teachers and the students in a class. The interaction types investigated in this research were based on the classification presented by Kumaravadivelu (2006), namely: Textual, Interpersonal, and Ideational Interaction. In regard to the theory of Halliday s systemic functional linguistics (1973), as the original base, the main objective of this study was to probe into the depth of questioning techniques, the interactions raised by these techniques between the teachers and the learners, and how this would have an effect on the development of EFL learners to grasp the ideas better in two levels of Elementary and Intermediate in different phases of teaching in order: Engagement, Study, and Activation. During data collection process, 20 sessions (10 Elementary and 10 Intermediate levels) of EFL classes and a population of 300 students in Rasht Kish Language Institute were observed by the researcher and the different types of questions and strategies were recorded. In this study the techniques that the teachers used, maintained or invented different types of interactions were discussed.

Keywords:

Ideational Interaction , Interpersonal Interaction , Textual Interaction