一位臺灣國小英語教師之教學信念與提問策略

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(1)國立屏東大學英語學系碩士班碩士論文指導教授：梁中行博士. 一位臺灣國小英語教師之教學信念與提問策略 A TAIWANESE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER’S TEACHING BELIEF AND PRACTICE IN QUESTIONING. 研究生：張家瓈撰. 中華民國一百零四年六月.

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(4) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis advisor, Dr. Jong-Shing Liang, for his insightful advice, patient instruction, and constant encouragement throughout the research process. this thesis would not be possible.. Without his thoughtful guidance, the completion of I really have learned a lot from him.. I would also like to express my profound gratitude to my committee members, Dr. Jackie Chang and Dr. Tung-Tao Yu, for their valuable and constructive comments. My research would be incomplete without their suggestions. I am also thankful for all the professors who have instructed me in my graduate education. Your teachings and advice inspire me. Also, I think I am the luckiest person in the world because I met some good classmates and friends when I studied in NPTU.. Jenny, I really appreciated for your. help and support when I conducted my study. Sharlene and Tommy, thank you for your company.. I will miss the days that we took educational programs together.. Greta, thank you for your help.. I felt so warm because you always gave me support. and took care of me. Lastly, I could not accomplish this thesis and my graduate studies without their love and support from my parents.. It was their sincere consideration that helped me pass. through the hard times in my graduate schools years. Their great love has made me courageous to persue my dream. The process of completing my graduate program was a long journey.. I really. appreciate for the people who have given assistance and encouragement to me. Thank you very much.. i.

(5) 一位臺灣國小英語教師之教學信念與提問策略摘要本研究旨在探討一位臺灣國小英語教師之教學信念與提問策略。觀察對象為一位國小英語教師與其任教的二個班級(一為六年級，一為四年級)。在研究開始前，研究者先與該教師進行一次訪談。訪談目的在了解此教師對於國小英語教學及提問策略之教學信念。之後，在為期一學期的觀察時間內，研究者進入課堂觀察，以錄影方式記錄教師在此不同班級中的提問特徵。而在研究結束後，研究者以刺激回憶法(stimulated recall)請該教師針對在比較其教學信念及課堂觀察後之不一致部份進行說明。研究結果細節分述如下: 一、在兩個班級中，教師使用展示性問題(display question)頻率明顯大於引申性問題(referential question)。造成此教師提問模式之因素有下列三點: 教科書內容、課程能力指標及學生個人生活經驗。二、展示性問題和引申性問題發揮不同的教學功能。教師提問展示性問題的目的有:檢查學生拼字是否正確、確認學生對教科書內容的理解、強調語言形式及引導學生找到正確的答案。至於引申性問題，則是發揮連結課本內容到學生生活經驗的功能。三、教師在提問方面的教學信念與其實際教學大致相符。唯有在提問的等待時間(wait time)方面，教師在訪談中提及通常提問後會等待三~五秒的時間，然而在實際教學中，教師僅在提問引申性問題時會等待學生回答，而在提問展示性問題時，則立刻請學生回答。此現象可歸因於問題的難易程度造成教師在提問引申性問題時需要等待以降低學生在回答英文問題時所可能產生的焦慮。根據以上結果，本研究建議師資培育機構及教師們應注重教師職前訓練，以利於教師在教學上能根據學生不同的學習需求來提問以提升教室互動。關鍵詞: 教師提問、教室言談、展示性問題、引申性問題、教學信念 ii.

(6) A TAIWANESE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER’S TEACHING BELIEF AND PRACTICE IN QUESTIONING. ABSTRACT This study takes aims at exploring an elementary school English teacher’s teaching belief and actual practice in questioning.. One English teacher and her two. classes of students (one Year-Six and one Year-Four class) took part in this study for a semester. The data sources included an interview with the teacher, video-recordings of the lessons, and a stimulated recall with the teacher.. More details of the finding of. this study are presented as follows. First, the teacher asked more display questions than referential questions. Three concerns were identified to affect the teacher’s asking more display questions, which are: the content of the textbooks, the competence indicators of curriculum, and the students’ personal life experiences. Second, display and referential questions served different pedagogical functions in the classes.. The teacher asked display questions to check the students’ word. spelling, to ensure the students’ comprehension of textbooks, to direct the students’ attention to form, and to guide the students to find the correct answer.. On the other. hand, the teacher asked referential questions in the classes to connect the textbook to the students’ life experiences. Finally, the teacher’s stated that teaching belief about questioning was basically consistent with her actual practice in the classes.. Only for the wait-time of. questioning, the teacher in the interview claimed that she usually waited for three to five seconds after posing a question, but she actually waited when asking referential questions. When the teacher asked display questions, she required her students to iii.

(7) answer questions immediately.. Due to the difficulty level of questions, the teacher. had to wait in order to reduce their anxiety of answering English questions when asking English questions. Based on the above findings, this study suggests that teacher trainers and teachers themselves should beware of the importance of in-service teacher training. Further, teachers can ask questions according to students’ different learning needs to improve the interaction in the classroom.. Keywords:. teachers’ questioning, classroom discourse, display question, referential question, teaching belief. iv.

(8) TABLE OF CONTENTS Page. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .........................................................................i CHINESE ABSTRACT ............................................................................. ii ENGLISH ABSTRACT............................................................................ iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................ v LIST OF TABLES .................................................................................. viii. CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ..................................................... 1 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW ....................................... 6 Teachers’ Questioning ........................................................................................... 6 Types of Teachers’ Questions......................................................................... 7 The Functions of Display and Referential Questions .................................... 8 Factors Affecting Teachers’ Questions ........................................................... 9 Teacher’s Teaching Beliefs.................................................................................. 11 The Sources of Teachers’ Teaching Beliefs ................................................. 12 Teachers’ Teaching Beliefs and Classroom Practices .................................. 13 Empirical Studies on Teachers’ Teaching Beliefs and Questioning .................... 16. CHAPTER THREE: METHODS .........................................................20 The Rationale ....................................................................................................... 20 The Participants ................................................................................................... 21 The Teacher .................................................................................................. 21 The Students................................................................................................. 21 Data Collection .................................................................................................... 22 v.

(9) Classroom Observation with a Video Recorder ........................................... 23 Semi-structured Interview ............................................................................ 23 Stimulated Recall ......................................................................................... 24 Data Management and Selection ................................................................. 24 Data Analysis ....................................................................................................... 26 Analyzing the Lesson Transcripts ................................................................ 26 Analyzing the Interview Transcripts ............................................................ 28 Analyzing the Stimulated Recall Transcripts ............................................... 28 Trustworthiness .................................................................................................... 28. CHAPTER FOUR: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ........................30 The Way the Teacher Asked Questions ............................................................... 30 The Pattern of the Teacher’s Question Posing ............................................. 30 Three Concerns behind the Teacher’s Asking More Display Questions ..... 33 The Functions of Display and Referential Questions .......................................... 38 Four Functions of Display Questions in the Classes ................................... 38 One Function of Referential Questions in the Classes................................. 52 The Relationship between the Teacher’s Teaching Beliefs and Classroom Practice ................................................................................................................. 56 The Teacher’s Teaching Belief and Practice in Questioning....................... 56 Wait-Time .................................................................................................... 58. CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS..............64 Summary of the Findings ..................................................................................... 64 Pedagogical Implications ..................................................................................... 65 Limitations and Suggestions ................................................................................ 66. REFERENCES........................................................................................68 vi.

(10) APPENDIX A--1 .....................................................................................74 APPENDIX A--2 .....................................................................................75 APPENDIX B--1 .....................................................................................76 APPENDIX B--2 .....................................................................................77 APPENDIX C ..........................................................................................78 APPENDIX D ..........................................................................................79 APPENDIX E ..........................................................................................80 APPENDIX F ..........................................................................................81 APPENDIX G ..........................................................................................83 APPENDIX H ..........................................................................................88. vii.

(11) LIST OF TABLES. Page Table 1. Time and Lesson Topic for the Year-Six Class…………………………..25. Table 2. Time and Lesson Topic for the Year-Four Class………………………....25. Table 3. The Coding Scheme of Question Types…..……………………………...26. Table 4. The Coding Scheme of the Functions of Display and Referential. Questions…………………………………………………..………………………....27 Table 5. The Frequency Distribution of the Question Types the Teacher. asked……………………………………………………….………………………....31. viii.

(12) CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION. In Taiwan, English is an important subject in the elementary education.. Since. 2001, the Ministry of Education (MOE, 2014) had made English a compulsory subject for elementary school students to learn from the fifth grade.. Later in 2005, the MOE. regulated English instruction starting from the third grade in elementary schools. One reason for the MOE to implement this early-start policy is to enable all the students to get in touch with the target language as early as possible. Once students start learning the language earlier, they are more likely to learn it well and be able to use it for communication. As Krashen (1985) suggests, language is best acquired through getting sufficient comprehensible input of the target language.. Therefore, it. is better for Taiwanese learners to contact with a lot of English that is a bit more challenging than their current English competence. The comprehensible English input is essential for Taiwanese students to learn English well because English is not spoken in their living environment and they need not use the language for communication. Therefore, what teachers say in English in the classrooms becomes the main linguistic input for them. Teacher talk can be seen as one source of linguistic input for the students to learn English.. In other words,. when the teachers speak English in class, their utterances fulfill two functions: 1) as a linguistic means to manage the class or communicate with the students, and 2) as the end goal for the students to aim for (Wong-Fillmore, 1985). To meet the two ends, the teachers must pose a great number of questions to either create sufficient opportunities to involve students in learning tasks, or assure all the events planned previously going smoothly.. Because of this, English teachers. should be skilled at employing questioning as an instructional tool to make their 1.

(13) teaching done and assist their students to learn. Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) found that in the classroom, the dominant conversational discourse pattern is the I-R-F (teacher initiation-student response-teacher feedback) or I-R-E (teacher initiation-student response-teacher evaluation) cycle.. In such discourse exchanges, teacher initiation and feedback. account for two-thirds of the conversation and thus, asking questions becomes a technique that language teachers commonly use to prompt classroom interaction (Barnes 1969; Brock, 1986; Cazden, 1988; Chaudron, 1988; Lee, 2006; Long and Sato,1983; Yang, 2010). Teachers’ questions come in different forms; display questions and referential questions are the types most frequently asked by language teachers (Long and Sato, 1983). These two question types function differently in the language classroom. Display questions are the questions whose answers are known by the teachers beforehand and teachers ask this kind of questions mainly to check students’ comprehension.. By contrast, referential questions are aimed to elicit unknown. information from students and such questions are assumed to be able to promote more interaction between teachers and students. To explore what kinds of questions usually asked by language teachers, Long and Sato (1983) analyzed 938 teacher questions collected in six elementary level ESL (English as a second language) lessons in the US, and found that among them, 476 belonged to display questions that did not at all intend to gain new information.. In a. similar vein, after looking into a non-native speaker teacher’s and a native speaker teacher’s question strategies in Taiwan, Yang (2010) found that both teachers asked more display questions than referential questions and that they did so mainly to help students review the lessons or vocabulary. A more important issue regarding language teaching and learning is how teachers 2.

(14) use different types of questions.. Some researchers focused on the functions of. teachers’ questions, teachers’ questioning strategies in different level classes, or the factors that affect teachers’ question strategies (Hsu, 2010; Poole, 1992; Wang and Wang, 2004; Weng, 2009; Wintergerst, 1994; Yang, 2010). For example, Weng (2009) and Hsu (2010) have found that the teachers in their studies posed more referential questions in the high-level class than in the low-level class.. Another. important factor that impacts teachers’ questioning performance is individual difference.. Wintergerst (1994) observed six female English teachers’ different ways. of employing different questioning strategies.. Of the three conversation teachers, as. Wintergerst found, one asked fewer questions in her beginning discussion class than the other two teachers did, and she did so mainly due to her inclusion of small group activities in class, which was intended to provide the students with more opportunities to speak up. Although the above studies explored how teachers asked questions and what factors affected their use of questioning, most of them were conducted from the observers’ viewpoint and with little attention to teachers’ inner worlds.. What. teachers think is another important factor to decide teachers’ practice in classrooms. Some researchers pointed out that teachers’ teaching beliefs influence classroom practices (Borg, 2001; Nespor,1987; Pajares,1992; Richards and Lockhart,1996; Zheng, 2009). Some studies have investigated the teachers’ teaching beliefs and practices in secondary school or junior high school levels (Chang, 2010; Farrel and Bennis, 2013; Hsu, 2007; Hussin, 2006). Hsu (2007) conducted a study to understand factors affecting two junior high school English teachers’ teaching beliefs and practices. After interviewing and observing the two teachers, three factors, textbooks, teachers’ previous teaching experiences and time limitation, were found to cause inconsistencies between these two teachers’ teaching beliefs and their actual 3.

(15) practices. Chang (2010) explored a junior high school English teacher’s teaching beliefs about classroom interaction and questioning in Taiwan.. In her study, the. teacher’s stated teaching beliefs were compared to her actual practices. The results of the study revealed that the teacher’s activity type and communicative language use were inconsistent between teaching beliefs and practices. From the above studies on teachers’ question use and their teaching beliefs and practices, it can be understood that teachers’ questioning in language classrooms is important and teachers’ teaching beliefs affect their practices.. However, the related. studies of English teachers’ teaching beliefs and practices mainly focused on senior or junior high school teachers.. There are few researchers exploring elementary English. teachers’ teaching beliefs and practices.. Among the studies of teachers’ teaching. belief and practice, there are even no researchers exploring the relationship between teachers’ teaching belief and questioning.. Much information is needed regarding. what EFL (English as a foreign language) elementary school teachers’ teaching beliefs and questioning are.. To fill the gap, this study aimed to investigate and compare. English teachers’ teaching beliefs and teaching practices, with a focus on teachers’ question use. To find the answers of the study, an elementary English teacher who taught two classes participated in the study.. I interviewed with the teacher, observed as well as. video-recorded the classes for one semester.. Then I made a stimulated recall with. the teacher to get a more complete picture of her teaching belief and practice in asking questions.. Three research questions of the study are specified as follows: Research Questions. 1. What is the Taiwanese elementary English teacher’s question pattern and what factors will affect her question pattern? 2.. What are the functions of the teacher’s display and referential questions? 4.

(16) 3.. What is the English teacher’s teaching belief in questioning?. Are there any. differences between the English teacher’s teaching belief and actual practice in questioning?. If so, why?. 5.

(17) CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW. This chapter reviews some studies related to this study. The first section is about teacher’s questioning, which is followed by teachers’ question types, functions and factors affecting teachers’ questioning.. Then, teacher’s teaching beliefs are. discussed. Finally, some empirical studies on teachers’ teaching beliefs and questioning are reported.. Teachers’ Questioning Chaudron (1988) mentioned that teachers’ questions play an important role in language classrooms.. Teachers, language teachers in particular, usually talk in. different ways inside and outside the classroom.. In classrooms, teachers ask. questions not only to elicit new information but also to check students’ understanding of the intended materials or to evaluate their student’s learning. Richards and Lockhart (1996) identified some reasons why teachers commonly used questions in teaching.. 1.. Teacher’s questions stimulate and maintain students’ interest.. 2.. Teacher’s questions encourage students to think and focus on the content of the lesson.. 3.. Teacher’s questions enable a teacher to clarify what a student has said.. 4.. Teacher’s questions enable a teacher to elicit particular structures or vocabulary items.. 5.. Teacher’s questions enable teachers to check students’ understanding. 6.

(18) 6.. Teacher’s questions encourage student participation in a lesson. (p.. 185) All in all, teachers ask questions for instruction, motivation and interaction.. In. terms of instruction, teachers pose questions to assist students to learn the target language and focus on the content of lessons. Questions are also used to raise students’ learning interests when students participate in classes. Moreover, teachers ask questions to interact with students so that they can check students’ understanding of the intended materials.. Types of Teachers’ Questions Teachers’ questions take different forms.. Barnes (1969) divided content. teachers’ questions into closed and open questions. A closed question is like, Do you like ice cream?, which can be answered with yes or no, but an open question, such as, Mary, why do you look unhappy today?, requires Mary to respond with a longer statement or say something unknown to the teacher.. Bialystok, Frohlich and Howard. (1978) divided teachers’ questions into “specific” and “general information” questions, which are similar to the concepts of closed and open questions. Richards and Lockhart (1996) divided questions into convergent and divergent questions according to the expected responses.. The convergent questions are to. guide students to recall the content that students learned before, so students’ responses of the convergent questions are usually short.. Different from the convergent. questions, the divergent questions encourage students’ various answers and require students to have high-level thinking. Long and Sato (1983) categorized teachers’ questions roughly into display and referential questions. An example of display questions is, Is the girl in the picture tall?, to which the teacher can easily get the answer by referring to the picture. Such 7.

(19) questions are basically aimed to understand, for example, whether the students can distinguish the two targeted words tall and short that were just taught the day before. On the other hand, Why didn’t you come to school yesterday? is a typical referential question; by posing this question, the teacher wants to know why the student was absent yesterday.. Because Long and Sato’s classification of teachers’ questions are. commonly used, it was adopted to analyze the teacher’s questions in this study. Questions that do not belong to display or referential questions are other questions (Lin, 1996; Wu, 2007). For example, comprehension check question (e.g., Do you understand?) and clarification check question (e.g., Can you say that again?) are categorized as other questions.. The Functions of Display and Referential Questions Display and referential questions are prevalently used by teachers in language classrooms (Long and Sato, 1983).. In the classroom, display and referential. questions function differently (Lee, 2006; Shomoossi, 2004); some researchers have investigated the use of teachers’ display or referential questions in the classroom (Ho, 2005; Lee, 2006; Liang, 1996; Nunan, 1987; Yu, 2007). For example, in examining the teacher’s questioning strategy in one CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) and one ESL (English as a second language) reading class in an American university, Liang (1996) found that these two teachers’ display questions fulfilled the following functions: drawing the students’ attention to the new vocabulary items, linking the reading text to the students’ real-world knowledge and experiences, and providing the students opportunities to practice using the target language. Also, at a university classroom but in Taiwan, Yu (2007) analyzed the questioning strategy by a local university professor at a high-intermediate Freshman 8.

(20) English class, and found that the teacher’s display questions served four instructional purposes: 1) to ensure students’ comprehension of the lesson, 2) to scaffold students’ listening comprehension by indicating the important parts of the listening material, 3) to expand classroom talk, and 4) to draw students’ attention to form. Lee (2006) also conducted a study to understand how display questions functioned in EFL (English as a foreign language) language classrooms.. He found. that teachers’ asking display questions was not only to understand learned information from students, but also to direct students to achieve certain goals, such as helping students acquire grammatical knowledge, or connecting students’ knowledge to the lesson-related terms. Teachers ask referential questions to get longer and complicated responses from students’ experiences or ideas.. They also use referential questions to. stimulate students’ higher-level thinking such as expressing their own opinions or experience (Brock, 1986; Ho, 2005; Long & Sato, 1983; White & Lightbown, 1984). Brock (1986) found that the purposes of teachers’ referential questions were encouraging students’ longer and complex responses.. White and Lightbown. (1984) also noted that teachers’ referential questions promote the communication in ESL classes.. In a word, different from display questions, referential questions aim. to elicit “lengthy, often complex responses” (Ho, 2005, p. 298).. Factors Affecting Teachers’ Questions Some factors such as lesson types, learners’ language proficiency level, individual teacher differences, and social cultural context may affect teachers’ questioning (Ellis, 2008; Wintergerst, 1994). 9.

(21) To understand how lesson types affect teachers’ questioning, Wang and Wang (2004) conducted a qualitative study to explore the questioning strategies used by two senior high school teachers in Taiwan. These two teachers were one foreign teacher and one native teacher of Taiwan. The classes of the study were one conversation class and one reading class.. There were seventeen 10th graders in the conversation. class and forty 10th graders in the reading class.. The researchers found that both. teachers asked more display questions (70% and 85%) than referential questions (30% and 15%). Not surprisingly, the teacher of reading class asked more display questions to check students’ reading comprehension while the teacher of conversation class asked more referential questions to encourage students’ interaction. Students’ proficiency level is another factor to influence teachers’ asking questions.. Yang (2010) explored questioning strategies used by two English. teachers in a cram school in southern Taiwan.. One teacher in the study taught an. immersion program while the other taught grammar and vocabulary in a regular English program.. She found that both teachers asked more display questions (70%. and 93%) than referential questions (30% and 7%) in classes, but, the teacher in the immersion program asked more referential questions than the other in the regular English program because the students of the immersion program had higher English proficiency level. Having the same results at Yang’s study (2010), Weng (2009) and Hsu (2010) proved that learners’ language proficiency level affected teachers’ questioning in the EFL context. They found teachers’ questions varied according to the students’ language proficiency level.. The teachers in the high proficiency level classes tended. to ask more referential questions than those in the low proficiency level classes. To seek another factor affecting teachers’ questioning strategies, Wintergerst (1994) investigated individual variation in teachers’ questioning of ESL classes. Six 10.

(22) female English teachers participated in the study.. The findings showed the teachers. varied their questioning behaviors from person to person. For example, compared to other teachers, one of the six teachers had tendency asking fewer questions in the beginning of discussion classes. A possible reason of the teacher’s different questioning behavior from the other teachers was that she carried out group work in her class and students of her class had more chances to talk. The last factor influencing teachers’ choice of questions is the social cultural context.. Poole (1992) explored some cultural messages that the second language. teachers performed in the classroom interaction. Two female ESL teachers coming from white, middle-class Western society and their beginning-level students participated in this study.. The findings showed that the teachers’ asking display. questions was one of the interactional features in the classroom.. In the middle-class. American society, the expert tended to assist the novice. Teachers coming from such a cultural background might follow this cultural convention.. In the classroom, to. help the students to join the class, the teacher might use more display questions. This study reveals that teachers’ cultural background might be a factor to affect teachers’ questioning types. In addition to the above factors influencing teachers questioning, Richards and Lockhart (1996) suggested that exploring what and how teachers think is necessary because “what teachers do is a reflection of what they know and believe” (p. 29).. Teacher’s Teaching Beliefs Teachers’ belief has various definitions (Borg, 2001; Borg, 2011; Fang, 1996; Farrel & Bennis, 2013; Pajares, 1992; Peacock, 2001; Zheng, 2009).. According to. Fang (1996), teachers’ belief was like a mental structure that influenced how people understand information and guided teachers’ behavior. 11. Teachers’ belief was.

(23) restricted by classroom issues, and was shaped by people’s personal and professional experiences.. Zheng (2009) also mentioned that teachers’ beliefs are important in. understanding the procedure of teachers’ thinking, their teaching practices, and changing or learning to teach.. Because the study is about language teaching, belief. is referred to as teachers’ teaching beliefs. Pajares (1992) mentioned that researchers define teachers’ beliefs as teachers’ educational beliefs, not teachers’ broader, general belief system.. He also stated that “Teachers’ attitude about education-about. schooling, teaching, learning, and students have generally been referred to as teachers’ beliefs” (p. 316).. In the study, the teacher’s teaching beliefs are expressed from. educational aspects which focus on the teacher’s interaction with students and questioning.. The Sources of Teachers’ Teaching Beliefs According to Richards and Lockhart (1996), teachers’ beliefs are mainly from six sources. These six sources shaping teachers’ teaching beliefs are teachers’ past learning experiences, teaching experiences, individual differences, school policies, teachers’ preferences of teaching principles, and teachers’ preferences of approaches or methods. First, teachers may use their own language learning experiences to decide how to help their students to deal with learning difficulties.. For example, the. participating teacher of the study, Mrs. Lin, had read questioning skills before, so she understood how to employ wait-time to reduce her students’ fear of answering questions.. Second, teachers’ teaching experiences help teachers to tell whether the. teaching strategies are effective in the classes or not.. For instance, in Farrel and. Bennis’ study (2013), the experienced teacher knew the importance of students’ learning outcome, so the teacher might focus on the effects of teaching strategies. 12.

(24) Third, teachers have their own individual differences such as educational background, personality and learning type.. For example, if teachers learn English by memorizing. grammar rules, they may think grammar is a foundation for students to learn English. Fourth, teachers may follow schools’ policies to decide their teaching ways.. For. instance, if certain activities such as readers’ theater are preferred and encouraged in a school, teachers may think developing students’ abilities of reading and speaking is important.. Fifth, teachers may have their particular preferences of teaching. principles. For example, the junior high school teacher in Chang’s study (2011) supported communicative language teaching, so she thought that using group work and creating more opportunities for students to communicate with each other were important and good for students’ learning.. Finally, teachers may follow their. preferences of approaches or methods when teaching.. For instance, teachers who. agree with the advantages of grammar translation method may intend to focus on explaining grammar rules for students. In sum, teachers’ beliefs are from six sources which include teachers’ past learning experiences, teaching experiences, individual differences, school policies, teachers’ preferences of teaching principles, and teachers’ inclination of approaches or methods.. Teachers’ Teaching Beliefs and Classroom Practices Teachers’ beliefs are from the above six sources and it seems that what teachers think affect what they do in classrooms.. Borg’s (2003) explanation of teacher. cognition indicates the relationships between teachers’ teaching beliefs and practices. Borg (2003) stated that teacher cognition is the “unobservable cognitive dimension of teaching-what teachers know, believe, and think” (p. 81).. Teachers’. teaching beliefs, what teachers know, believe and think, are affected by schooling, 13.

(25) professional coursework, contextual factors and classroom practice. Schooling is regarded as the initial training experience to shape teachers’ perceptions of teaching. Then, schooling brings the effects to shape teachers’ existing cognitions when they do professional coursework such as teaching.. According to Borg (2003), contextual. factors such as teachers’ teaching experiences, teaching materials, class time, size and students’ proficiency level are seen to “ influence practice either by modifying cognitions or else directly, in which case incongruence between cognition and practice may result” in a classroom (p. 82). Some researchers have investigated possible factors affecting teachers’ beliefs and their classroom practices (Basturkmen, 2012; Chang, 2010; Fang, 1996; Farrel & Bennis, 2013; Hsu, 2007; Zheng, 2009). Hsu (2007) investigated the reasons causing discrepancies between junior high school English teachers’ teaching beliefs and classroom practices in grammar instruction in Taiwan.. Two junior high school English teachers participated in the. study. Data collection consisted of open-ended questionnaires, transcriptions of interviews, classroom observations, and stimulated recall. Three reasons were found to cause inconsistencies between the two teachers’ stated beliefs and actual teaching practices. The first reason was the social teaching norms, such as the use of textbook. These two teachers supported that teachers should provide more examples for students to learn English grammar.. However, the instructional sequence of grammar. on the textbook caused the inconsistencies of the teachers’ stated beliefs and practices. They commented that textbooks were the major source of teaching English in junior high school in Taiwan so they sticked to them and follow their teaching objectives and steps. The second reason was that the two teachers’ teaching experiences in prior 14.

(26) schools affected their choosing teaching styles and question types.. One teacher. employed proactive teaching rather than reactive teaching when she taught “want” and “would like” at that time. The previous teaching experiences reminded her to pick up the interrogative and negative forms of “would like” that students easily made errors for instruction.. Moreover, the other teacher did not ask multi-focal questions. and chose Wh-questions in her actual practice instead. Teaching experiences of many years led her to find the decreasing English proficiency levels among junior high school students and change her questioning types. The last reason was the immediate classroom instruction such as time constraints. One teacher stated that she adopted “clarification requests” rather than “elicitation” because elicitation was extremely time-consuming. On the other hand, the other teacher lacked sufficient time to do listening practice in her classes.. The two. teachers’ perceptions of time pressure squeezed them to take the shortcut, regardless of their stated goals and objectives. Chang (2010) also conducted a qualitative study to explore junior high school English teachers’ teaching beliefs and their teaching practices in classroom interaction and questioning in Taiwan. the study.. One teacher and her seventh grade class participated in. A semi-structured interview was used to understand the teacher’s teaching. beliefs. Through observing the teacher’s classes and taking field notes, the researcher collected detailed information about the teacher’s teaching practices. Stimulated recall was conducted to clarify the consistencies or inconsistencies between the teacher’s teaching beliefs and practices. The discrepancies between the teacher’s stated beliefs and actual practices were the activity type and communicative language use.. She stated that curriculum or tests did not allow her to conduct more. communicative activities in class.. Students’ limited proficiency in English was. another factor to cause her teaching in drills rather than encouraging students’ more 15.

(27) communication with each other. Also, the large class prevented her from arranging more group work. Farrel and Bennis’ study (2013) confirmed that teachers’ experiences affected their teaching practice.. They compared the stated beliefs and observed classroom. practices of two English language teachers in Canada. One experienced teacher and one novice teacher participated in the study.. In the study, both of the teachers taught. upper-intermediate classes. The experienced teacher was responsible for teaching a test-preparation course and the novice teacher taught general English class.. A. background survey, non-participatory observations, and semi-structured interview were used to collect data.. The results of this case study indicated that the more. experienced teacher aimed to focus on students’ learning outcome but the novice teacher made instructional decisions based on keeping his students happy. In brief, the above review of the studies suggest that the factors causing the differences between teachers’ beliefs and classroom practices include curriculum materials, time, students’ proficiency level, personal factors, and teachers’ former experiences.. Empirical Studies on Teachers’ Teaching Beliefs and Questioning Although some research examines language teachers’ practices such as interactional patterns, choice of language, activity types, questioning behavior and feedback, few studies have investigated the relationship between teachers’ teaching beliefs and the ways they ask questions in the classrooms. To understand teachers’ teaching beliefs and how they asked questions, Hussin (2006) carried out a qualitative study in Malaysia, which employed individual and extended interviews of three English teachers, focus group interview with the students of two classes, classroom observations, and reviewing such documents as 16.

(28) the teachers’ lesson plans and textbooks. According to the coding scheme developed by the researcher, the teachers’ questions were divided into three broad categories: academic, non-academic, and pseudo questions. Academic questions are related to the content of the lesson.. Non-academic questions are posed for. management, rather than expecting answers from students. Pseudo questions are the questions that the teacher poses a question to the class but then provides the answer by him or herself. further in the study.. Only academic questions were considered and analyzed. The teachers’ academic questions were assigned to four. categories: factual, empirical, productive, and evaluative. teachers asking questions based on some facts.. Factual questions are. For example, teachers ask questions. based on the content of story books, so the answers to the factual questions are fixed and precise. Empirical questions are the questions relating to people’s real life experiences.. For instance, teachers pose empirical questions for students to know. their everyday activities.. Productive and evaluative questions are the questions that. need students’ creative answers or require students to give their opinions to comment some issues. From the features of these above question types, it is noted that factual and empirical questions are considered low-level while productive and evaluative were considered high-level questions. The results showed that students’ tests affected the three teachers’ beliefs in asking questions.. The reason for the teachers’ asking low level questions was that. the exam format included 50% of low level questions.. Because most of the. questions, such as multiple-choices, short phrases, or one-sentence answers in examinations belonged to low-level, the teachers chose to use more factual questions to help students pass the exams rather than pose high-level questions to encourage students to express what they thought in classes. Chang (2010) conducted an interview study with an English teacher in a public 17.

(29) junior high school in Taiwan in order to understand the teacher’s teaching beliefs about questioning purpose, the functions of display and referential questions, and questioning strategies.. The teacher’s purposes of questioning were to check students’. comprehension, guide students to practice sentences, activate students’ schemata, and stimulate their thinking. The functions of the teacher’s display questions were to draw students’ attention, help students practice in target language, and check students’ understanding while referential questions are to encourage students to provide their own information in the classroom. The teacher’s questioning strategies were to help students respond to questions in class such as giving examples, key words, translation, sentences patterns and waiting for more time. Through observing the teacher’s classes, the teacher’s actual practices on questioning were consistent with her beliefs. According to Chang (2010), the consistencies between the teacher’s teaching beliefs and practices were reasonable because teachers usually taught lessons according to what they believed. So far, this chapter has discussed teachers’ teaching beliefs and questions. Among teachers’ different practices in classrooms, teacher talk plays an important part in language teachers’ teaching practices.. However, there are still some issues to. be explored. First, some studies investigated the relationship between language teachers’ teaching beliefs and practices, but they mostly focused on the teachers’ interaction with students. Few of them aimed to understand the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and questioning. Second, while some studies explored the teaching beliefs of teachers in secondary school or junior high school level on question strategies in the EFL and ESL context, few have looked at elementary school teachers’ teaching beliefs about questioning in the EFL context.. Third, even though there. were some studies understanding factors affecting teachers’ questioning, these studies did not provide a further discussion on how teachers’ teaching beliefs affected the way 18.

(30) they ask questions. For these reasons, this study was conducted to explore an elementary school English teacher’s teaching beliefs and questioning.. 19.

(31) CHAPTER THREE METHODS. This chapter begins with a rationale for adopting a qualitative research design to implement the study. The participant of this study will then be introduced. Afterwards, the data collection process, the data management and selection, and the coding scheme for data analysis are described. The techniques to enhance the trustworthiness of the study are illustrated in the final section.. The Rationale The study aimed to understand an elementary English teacher’s teaching beliefs and her teaching practice in asking questions. Due to the open-ended nature of the research questions, I found it appropriate to apply a qualitative research design to conduct my study and answer the research questions posed in the first chapter. As Merriam (2009) stressed, qualitative research focuses on how people interpret their experiences and perspectives of their inner worlds. van Lier (1988) also suggested that qualitative research can best help researchers to understand the interaction between a teacher and students in the language classroom, because it aims to understand “the occurrence of different types of questions as they naturally occur through observation, description and analysis” (p. 38). More specifically, I chose to observe the participating teacher’s classes, and conduct interviews with her to get answers to the research questions of the study.. 20.

(32) The Participants The Teacher Mrs. Lin, a pseudonym, was a non-native English teacher who held a bachelor’s degree in language education and studied at a graduate program in English teaching during this study was conducted.. In 2006, she was qualified to teach English in the. elementary school and began her life as an elementary English teacher.. At the time. the study was conducted, she had eight years of teaching experience and taught students from the third grade to the sixth grade in the school.. In her point of view, to. foster students’ interests in learning English, she adopted more activities, group discussions and dramas in class. She especially mentioned that encouraging students to practice their oral skills of English without being afraid of making mistakes was very important.. Mrs. Lin hoped that her students could develop strong abilities in. reading through learning English in elementary school and be able to apply phonics to reading.. The Students Two classes that Mrs. Lin taught took part in the study as well: one Year-Six class and one Year-Four class.. All the students were native speakers of Chinese and. learned English as a foreign language. The Year-Six class was composed of 23 students (12 boys and 11girls).. For them, this was the third year of English learning. and they attended this class every Monday morning, from 8:40 a.m. to 9:20 a.m. and Wednesday morning, from 9:30 a.m. to 10:10 a.m.. Mrs. Lin employed one teaching. material: Dino on the Go! 7, published by Han Lin Education Publisher. Year-Four class was composed of 19 students (8 boys and 11 girls).. The. For them, this. was the second year of English learning and they had this class two times a week (Monday morning, from 9:30 a.m. to 10:10 a.m. and Thursday afternoon, 2:30 p.m. to 21.

(33) 3:10 p.m.).. In the Year- Four class, Mrs. Lin employed Dino on the Go! 3, published. by Han Lin Education Publisher.. Data Collection Before detailing the procedure of data collection, I explained how I found the participating teacher.. My study focused on elementary English teachers’ teaching. beliefs and their actual practices in questioning.. The participating teachers should be. elementary English teachers. In August, 2014, I contacted some elementary English teachers who fitted with the criteria of participating in my study.. Unfortunately, only Mrs. Lin showed her strong. willingness of joining the study. Then, I explained to her my research interests.. I. told her that my focus was on teachers’ teaching belief and practice and I needed to observe her classes for one semester.. My research methods included semi-structured. interview, video recording of the classes, and stimulated recall. After I offered an explanation of my research project, she gave me two responses. First, she had a grade 6 and a grade 4 on every Monday, Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon. The time schedule of these two classes on Monday might be more convenient for me to observe.. Second, she agreed with my class observation,. video recording of the classes, and interview in the first and stimulated recall in the final phase of the study.. With the teacher’s permission, I decided to observe her two. classes of grade 6 and grade 4 to collect more data.. I started to observe and video. record her classes from September 22, 2014 to the end of the semester.. Prior to the. observation, the teacher had only been informed of the purpose of the study of observing the teacher’s practices. On September 2, 2014, I brought a consent form (see Appendix A), questionnaire of the teacher’s background information (see Appendix B) to Mrs. Lin. After 22.

(34) showing her the consent form, Mrs. Lin agreed to participate and signed the form. Then, I interviewed her to understand her general teaching beliefs after she signed the consent form and finished the background questionnaire.. In sum, in the study, three. major sources of data were collected: 1) video-recorded lessons, 2) an interview with the teacher and 3) a stimulated recall with the teacher.. Classroom Observation with a Video Recorder Mrs. Lin’s classes were observed and video-recorded twice a week over one semester.. While observing Mrs. Lin’s classes, I sat in the back of the classroom and. video-recorded the teaching practices with a video recorder (see Appendix C). The decision for video-recording was based on the suggestions by Bottorff (1994) and Thompson and Waitzkin (1999). As they explained, video-recorded data contained utterances and behaviors within certain social contexts, and allows the researcher to examine and re-examine a recorded event at different points in time. Merriam (2009) also stated that researchers can collect data that happen in the natural situation and that observational data provide firsthand information to interpret the phenomenon. Therefore, the recorded data could help refresh my memory of the teacher’s classes while transcribing and analyzing the data.. It also helped Mrs. Lin. in recalling her teaching practice during the later stimulated recall.. Semi-structured Interview To understand Mrs. Lin’s general teaching beliefs, a semi-structured interview was conducted on September 2, 2014 before the class observations started. first filled out a questionnaire about her background information.. Mrs. Lin. Then, she was. interviewed to understand her beliefs about English teaching for elementary school students, interaction with students and questioning strategies. 23. I prepared a set of.

(35) questions to ask her teaching beliefs (see Appendix D), adopted from Chang (2010). The interview lasted about two and a half hours and was audio-recorded with her permission. One advantage of semi-structured interviews is for the interviewer to “vary the questions as the situation demands” (Lichtman, 2010, p. 141). Through the semi-structured interview, I could not only adjust the tentative research questions, but also allow Mrs. Lin to express her teaching beliefs.. Stimulated Recall I conducted stimulated recall with Mrs. Lin on March 17, 2015.. As Mackey. and Gass (2005) suggested, stimulated recall can help researchers to understand the participant’s inner world and to get a more complete picture of the classroom. I went through the video-recordings of Mrs. Lin’s six lesson units.. First,. I analyzed her. video-recordings and lesson transcripts mainly based on her use of questions.. Then,. I invited Mrs. Lin to watch the video-recorded lessons with me and asked her why she posed a question or what she was thinking about at that time in Chinese.. The. stimulated recall lasted for three hours and was audio-recorded with her permission.. Data Management and Selection After checking all the video-recording classes, six lesson units (three from the Year-Six class, three from the Year-Four class) collected purposely at the beginning, the middle, and the end of the semester were selected as the main data to analyze; it was because Mrs. Lin asked relatively more and different kinds of questions in these six lesson units. minutes.. The school had 22 weeks in this semester and each class was 40. Tables 1 and 2 show the time and lesson topic of Mrs. Lin’s classes. 24.

(36) Table 1 Time and Lesson Topic for the Year-Six Class Date. Week. Lesson topic. September 22, 2014. Week 4. Where Are You From?. November 17, 2014. Week 12. What Do You Do In The Morning?. January 19, 2015. Week 21. Festivals: Chinese New Year. Table 2 Time and Lesson Topic for the Year-Four Class Date. Week. Lesson topic. September 22, 2014. Week 4. Starter Unit. November 17, 2014. Week 12. What Are These?. January 19, 2015. Week 21. Culture: Food Around The World. All the recorded lessons, interview data and stimulated recall were transcribed verbatim with Word Processor.. Before transcribing the data, I first typed the date,. time, class, location and theme of observation. Then, I transcribed the recorded data, and all the transcripts were line-numbered to help me to find desired information efficiently. The sample format of lesson transcript, interview transcript and stimulated recall are presented in Appendixes E, F and G. With regard to the language for the transcripts, the video-recorded lessons transcripts followed the teacher’s and the students’ language choices (i.e., Chinese or English) in class, using the transcript convention adapted from Markee’s (2000) (see Appendix H). The interview data was transcribed verbatim in Chinese. the work was done, all of the transcripts were printed out for analysis.. After all. However,. when shown in the Chapter 4, the extracts were transcribed in Chinese characters, followed by their English translations in brackets.. 25.

(37) Data Analysis The data analyzed for this study included the transcripts of six video-recorded lessons, and one interview and stimulated recall.. The process of analyzing data is. detailed as follows.. Analyzing the Lesson Transcripts The lesson transcripts were used as the main data to understand Mrs. Lin’s question pattern and the functions of display and referential questions.. I used two. coding schemes to analyze Mrs. Lin’s lesson transcripts to answer the first and the second research questions. The two coding schemes were explained as follows. To explore Mrs. Lin’s question pattern, I followed the following coding scheme, which was based on Long and Sato’s (1983), Lin’s (1996) and Wu’s (2007) classifications of teacher’s display, referential questions and other questions, as shown in Table 3.. Table 3 The Coding Scheme of Question Types Type of Question Display questions－Questions that the. Example How many characters are there in the story?. teacher knows the answer beforehand and which are designed to elicit particular linguistic knowledge from students. Referential questions－Questions that the. How do you go to school today?. teacher does not know the answer beforehand. In addition, students can share various personal information or experiences. Other questions－Questions that do not. Do you understand?. belong to display or referential questions, such as comprehension check question.. 26.

(38) To investigate the functions of display and referential questions, I focused on Mrs. Lin’s questions when I went through all her lesson transcripts.. The questions. that Mrs. Lin asked were noted and classified as display, referential or other questions. The coded questions were tallied and analyzed in order to understand what question pattern that Mrs. Lin had in classes. To investigate the functions of Mrs. Lin’s display and referential questions, I first took some functions of display and referential questions in Hsu’s (2010) study as the references to get general ideas of the functions of teachers’ questions. Then, I matched Mrs. Lin’s lesson transcripts to the functions of display and referential questions in Hsu’s (2010) study. Finally, I made a revision to keep the functions of questions that were found in Mrs. Lin’s classes and weeded out those that Mrs. Lin did not use.. The coding scheme is detailed as follows.. Table 4 The Coding Scheme of the Functions of Display and Referential Questions Type of Question. Function. Example. Display Question. to check students’ spelling. How do you spell Taiwan?. to ensure students’ comprehension of textbooks. Where are Irene, Dino, Nicky and all?. to direct the students’ attention to form to guide students to find the correct answer to relate the textbook to the students’ life experiences. For all the words here, they have “s”, why? Which one answer do you think is correct? If you were in Singapore, if you were there, what. Referential Question. would you want to do?. I analyzed Mrs. Lin’s lesson transcripts in terms of the two coding schemes and some certain dialogues of Mrs. Lin and her students were selected and presented in 27.

(39) Chapter 4 to explain that how Mrs. Lin asked questions and the functions of her display and referential questions.. Analyzing the Interview Transcripts Before analyzing the interview transcripts, I read through the entire transcripts to get a general idea of Mrs. Lin’s belief about her question use.. In the interview. transcripts, I explored 1) what her questioning was, and 2) what the functions of her display and referential questions were.. Analyzing the Stimulated Recall Transcripts When analyzing the data of stimulated recall, I compared Mrs. Lin’s interview transcripts to her video-recording classes.. The stimulated recall questions were. mainly from Mrs. Lin’s teaching practices such as what she was thinking when asking some questions.. In the stimulated recall transcripts, I focused on 1) what functions. of display and referential questions were, 2) what inconsistencies between her teaching beliefs and actual practice were, and 3) what reasons might cause such inconsistencies.. Trustworthiness Research findings are likely to be put into practice or taken as references by readers or researchers, so the quality of the findings of a study should be secured as much as possible.. To do this, three techniques often used by qualitative researchers. employed in this study: triangulation, member checking, and peer examination, to ensure the trustworthiness of the results (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Merriam, 2009). Triangulation requires the researcher to employ different data-collection techniques so as to avoid having the chances of interpreting the findings improperly 28.

(40) (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Merriam, 2009).. To meet the goal, I collected data. through a semi-structured interview, video-recorded lessons and a stimulated recall. The semi-structured interview was used to understand Mrs. Lin’s general teaching belief in questioning. The analysis of video-recorded lessons was to explore Mrs. Lin’s questioning pattern and the functions of questions. Stimulating recall with the teacher was to investigate the reasons why she asked the questions in different language context and the factors causing the inconsistency between her teaching belief and classroom practice.. By using the three techniques, I could interpret the. teacher’s teaching belief and practice in questioning more correctly. Merriam (2009) suggests that member checking is an important way to prevent researchers from misunderstanding what they observed or participants said and did. To meet the criterion of member checking, Mrs. Lin was invited to participate in the examination of collected data as well as provide her comments on my transcription and interpretation. Through her comments, my bias was greatly reduced. To check my interpretations of the findings, I used peer examination.. Peer. examination can help researcher to check whether the findings of the data are plausible (Merriam, 2009).. A Chinese fellow graduate student majoring in English. language teaching assisted me, as a second coder, to assess the dependability of the result analysis. Before coding, I first explained the coding scheme to him, and he practiced using the coding scheme on a small set of randomly selected transcript from this study. After the practice, he coded ten percent of the randomly selected written transcribed lessons (6 pages from the 60-page written transcript).. Then, I used the. Cohen’s Kappa and the inter-coder reliability score was .86, reaching the inter-rater reliability at least .70 on the coding scheme (Ary, Jacobs, Razavieh & Sorensen, 2006) 29.

(41) CHAPTER FOUR RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. This chapter presents the results of the study. The teacher’s questioning are illustrated first. The functions that the teacher’s display and referential questions served in the classes are discussed next.. Finally, differences between the teacher’s. teaching beliefs and her actual practices in class are dealt with.. The Way the Teacher Asked Questions The first research question examines the kinds of questions that the teacher asked over the semester. To answer the question, six lesson units were selected, transcribed and analyzed.. As explained in Chapter 3, only three class periods at the. beginning, the middle, and the end of the semester were chosen for data analysis. In each of the samples that follow, the targeted question is underlined, and the English translations appear in the bracket.. The Pattern of the Teacher’s Question Posing In general, Mrs. Lin posed more display questions than referential questions. This finding has been reported in the previous studies (Hsu, 2010; Huang & Chang, 2006).. Table 5 demonstrates an overall picture of the question types Mrs. Lin. asked.. 30.

(42) Table 5 The Frequency Distribution of the Question Types the Teacher Asked Type. Classes. Display. 235 (45%). Referential. 63 (12%). Other. 226 (43%). Total. 524 (100%). As shown above, about 45% of the questions (235 out of 524) that Mrs. Lin asked are display questions, only 12% (63 out of 524) are referential questions and about 43% (226 out of 524) are other questions. To exemplify each type of the questions asked by Mrs. Lin, an example of each question type is provided and explained in the following.. Example 1 below shows. one display question Mrs. Lin asked,. Example 1 T: How do you say 美國? [How do you say America?] SS: America. T: Good. America. 有沒有人會說不那麼長字母的? [Can anyone say the word that has fewer letters?] S5: U.S.A. T: Good job. The U.S.A. (Lesson transcript, Year-Four class, Jan. 19, 2015) The first question “How do you say 美國?” is a typical display question, to which Mrs. Lin already knew the answer before she actually asked it.. In order to review. the names of the countries that had been taught before, Mrs. Lin required the students to speak out the name of the country in English.. Afterwards, she posed another. display question “Can anyone say the word that has fewer letters?” for her students to 31.

(43) try out the other way of saying America.. Clearly, these are two display questions. posed in this dialogue. Different from display questions, referential questions are asked because the teacher wants to know something she does not know (Long & Sato, 1983).. For. example,. Example 2 T: What’s your most impressive experience in your Chinese New Year? S2:拿紅包。[Take red envelopes.] (Lesson transcript, Year-Six class, Jan. 19, 2015) In the dialogue, the referential question “What’s your most impressive experience in your Chinese New Year?” was intended to encourage the student to share his experiences of Chinese New Year.. The question was related to the topic of the. textbook, Festival, and Mrs. Lin asked it because she wanted to know what her students did during Chinese New Year.. Since referential questions do not require a. definite answer, the students could share any experiences that they had been through in Chinese New Year. In the study, Mrs. Lin did not only use display and referential questions.. She. also asked the questions that did not belong to display or referential questions in her classes.. As stated in Chapters 2 and 3, teachers use comprehension check question. to check students’ understanding of intended materials and classroom discipline question to manage classes.. After analyzing the lesson transcripts of Mrs. Lin’s. classes, she also usually employed questions that do not belong to display or referential questions to check her students’ comprehension, to clarify the answers that her students gave, and to confirm the students’ responses to her questions.. That is. the reason why Mrs. Lin asked relatively more questions that did belong to display or 32.

(44) referential questions.. After understanding Mrs. Lin question types, it is necessary to. further investigate the reasons why she chose to ask more display questions than referential in classes. The following three concerns behind Mrs. Lin’s questioning pattern may account for why she asked more display questions than referential questions.. Three Concerns behind the Teacher’s Asking More Display Questions In the interview, Mrs. Lin mentioned that the way she asked questions might be constrained by these concerns: the content of the textbooks, the competence indicators of curriculum, and the students’ personal life experiences.. The Content of the Textbooks On further examination of Mrs. Lin’s questioning in the classes, it is found that she asked questions mostly based on the content of the textbooks.. The following. lesson transcript shows how Mrs. Lin asked questions according to the content of the textbook.. Example 3: T: What is his job? Who can tell me his job? S2: He is a cook. T: Yes, he is a cook. Do you remember cook? Remember? 還記得嗎? [Remember?] 我們以前學過這個職業。[We have learned the occupation before.] SS:廚師。[Cook.] T: Perfect.. 廚師。[Cook.] (Lesson transcript, Year-Four class, Sep. 22, 2014). The conversation happened after the students watched the electronic story book. Mrs. Lin usually prepared some questions for her students after they watched the story 33.

(45) two times.. In the dialogue, Mrs. Lin posed a question about the main character of. the story. She asked her students what job the boy had.. When one student. answered cook, Mrs. Lin focused on the word and reminded the class that they had learned the word before.. In the stimulated recall, Mrs. Lin explained how she was. influenced by the content of the textbook when asking questions.. In the following. extract, the English translations appear in the bracket.. [The arrangement of the content of the textbooks has its sequence and logic. I usually decide what questions to ask according to the students’ textbooks while preparing for the classes. If there are things that the students have learned before such as one sentence, “Is your brother a cook”, in the textbook of fourth graders, I will ask the question to check whether they still remember the meaning of the word, cook.] 國小課本的編排有它一定的順序和(.)邏輯，我上課前的準備一直是以小朋友的課本內容來做要決定要問他們什麼問題。如課程內容中若有一些他們之前學過的內容，例如像四年級課本中有一句故事的台詞是”Is your brother a cook?”那因為這個字 cook 孩子們其實之前就學過這個職業，所以我會用問題來確認學生記不記得 cook 這個單字的意思。 (Stimulated recall transcript, March. 17, 2015). As Mrs. Lin mentioned, the content of the textbook is the first factor affecting her way of questioning.. Since the Year-Four graders had learned the word cook. before, she decided to pose a display question to check if her students still remembered the meaning of the word.. Mrs. Lin followed the content of the. textbooks to prepare questions before the classes, so she asked rather more display questions for her students to check the students’ understanding of the content of the textbooks.. This finding is consistent with the research findings of Hsu (2010), who. investigated an elementary school English teacher’s questioning strategy in different English proficiency level classes and found that the teacher in her study posed display 34.

(46) questions to check whether her students of high level class understand the content of story of textbook.. The Competence Indicators of Curriculum The second factor that influences the teacher’s question pattern is a concern about the competence indicators of curriculum.. The competence indicators of. curriculum, or the Grade 1-9 competence indicators of curriculum, were issued by the MOE to guide the teachers to measure whether their students have possessed certain abilities, such as listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities of English at a certain grade (K-12 Education Administration, MOE, 2015).. In other words, the. competence indicators provide teaching objectives for the teachers, so Mrs. Lin had followed closely the indicators during her teaching.. The lesson transcripts shows. how she asked display questions to meet the competence indicators of curriculum.. Example 4: T: That’s right. What is the UK? SS:英國。[The UK] T:英國? 美國? [The UK or the USA?] SS:英國。[The UK] T: Right. Let’s say it. SS: The UK. Ready?. The UK.. (Lesson transcript, Year-Six class, Sep. 22, 2014) The dialogue happened at the beginning of the class. Mrs. Lin asked display questions to help her students review the vocabulary of the unit that they learned last time.. In this class, Mrs. Lin first asked a display question, What is the UK?, to check. whether her students understand the Chinese meaning of the UK or not.. Then, after. her students answered “The UK”, Mrs. Lin continued to ask another display question “The UK or the USA?” in Chinese to confirm that her students were able to 35.

(47) distinguish the names of two different countries.. In the stimulated recall, Mrs. Lin. explained why she asked this kind of questions,. [In addition to the content of textbooks, I think the competence indicators of curriculum is another part that I will notice. If the indicators of learning require the students to listen, understand the vocabulary or can speak simple sentences, I will focus on these competence indicators of curriculum to design the questions that I ask.] 除了課本的內容外，我覺得課程的能力指標也是我會注意的。若這個年級需要學習的指標是希望學生達到可聽辨課堂所習得的字彙或是會講簡易的句子，我會針對這些課程指標來設計提問的題目。 (Stimulated recall transcript, March. 17, 2015). As the extract illustrated, Mrs. Lin noticed the competence indicators of curriculum when she decided how to ask questions.. She mentioned that if the. students needed to have the ability on listening and understanding the vocabulary, she arranged to ask questions about the intended vocabulary or sentence patterns.. Mrs.. Lin focused on her students’ abilities of vocabulary or sentences and followed the competence indicators of curriculum of 1-1-3, which indicates that students can listen and distinguish the vocabulary they learned in class (K-12 Education Administration, MOE, 2015) when asking questions, so she asked more display questions for her students to gain basic abilities.. The Students’ Personal Life Experiences The last factor influencing Mrs. Lin’s questioning is the students’ personal life experiences.. The following example shows how Mrs. Lin used display questions to. interact with her students.. 36.