Teacher's Questions: A Survey of English Teachers' Questioning Techniques

Abstract

Central to classroom teaching is the teacher/student interaction known as the "recitation", a process described by Gage and Berliner in this fashion: the continually repeated chain of events in which 1. the teacher provides structuring, briefly formulating the topic or issue to be discussed, then 2. the teacher solicits a response or asks a question of one or more students; then 3. the student responds or answers the question; and 4. the teacher reacts to the student's answer. Most of works spoken by teachers are emitted in the form of questions. In his review of studies which consider the role of questions in teaching, Gall reports a figure as high as 150 questions per hour for elementary school teachers, whicle Guilford notes that questioning represents as much as 80 percent of teacher talk. In the Bahamian context there has been little empirical research carried out of any kind, and as classroom teaching is the basic procedure in Bahamian education, many of the teacher behaviour variables that are involved, such as questioning, have yet to be assessed.