Questioning practice in the EFL classroom

Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 22(1), 1-26. doi: 10.1080/15362426.2019.1569412 Herrick, J. A. (2017). The history and theory of rhetoric: An introduction. New York, NY: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315404141 Galperin, I. R. (1981). Stilistika anglijskogo yazyka [English stylistics]. Moscow: Vysshaya Shkola. Kaufer, D. S., & Butler, B. S. (2013). Rhetoric and the arts of design. New York, NY: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9780203811078 Leech, G. N. (2014). A linguistic guide to English poetry. London: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315836034 Leech, G. N. (2016). Principles of pragmatics. London: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315835976 Mack, P. (2011). A history of Renaissance rhetoric 1380-1620. Oxford University Press. Murphy, J. J., Katula, R. A., & Hoppmann, M. (2013). A synoptic history of classical rhetoric. Routledge. Ninio, A. (2018). Pragmatic development. New York, NY: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9780429498053 Paducheva, E. V. (1996). Semanticheskije issledovanija [Semantic studies]. Moscow: Yazyki Slavyanskoi Kultury. Selden, R., Widdowson, P., & Brooker, P. (2016). A reader’s guide to contemporary literary theory. London: Routledge. Skrebnev, Y. M. (2003). Osnovy stilistiki anglijskogo yazyka [Fundamentals of English stylistics]. Moscow: Astrel. Van Peer, W. (Ed.). (2016). The taming of the text: Explorations in language, literature and culture. Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781315544526 Wolfreys, J., Robbins, R., & Womack, K. (2016). Key concepts in literary theory. London: Routledge. Questioning has been identified in the literature as a key teaching and learning activity with the quantity and quality of questions directly linked to language acquisition and a general positive learning experience. The purpose of this empirical study was to explore patterns of questions used by EFL teachers in a classroom environment. Using an observation methodology, four teachers were observed in class and a transcript made of the questions they each asked their learners. The teachers were then asked to attempt a classification of the question types in order to gain an insight into the strategy from the perspective of teacher cognition. The results confirmed that questioning is a major teaching technique that is appreciated by teachers and manipulated for a variety of pedagogical purposes. Questions most valued by teachers as instrumental in achieving quality learning were those which guided learners to the pursuit of meaningful and motivating goals with a high degree of cognitive and linguistic challenge.

The purpose of this study is to explore patterns of questions used by EFL teachers in a classroom environment. There are three aims: (1) to quantify and hence verify questioning as a core tool in the classroom; (2) to elicit from teachers a classification of their questions according to perceived pedagogical function; (3) to compare and interpret teachers' classifications. The first aim is the most obvious in the sense that when any mass phenomena occur, the counting of observations seems informative if not imperative.
The emphasis on quantification has been criticised as a tendency to pursue measurement as a goal in itself, concomitant with the 'obsession [with a] medical mode of research' (Goodwyn, 2010, p. 25). Thus, McCarthy and Carter (2001)  'There is a danger in taking questioning for granted and assuming that because it is common it must be good for students and easy for teachers to apply' documentation of this fact is a valid research direction.
The second and third aims concern the more challenging issue of why questioning is so pervasive and how different patterns and motivations can be accounted for. This necessitates classifying the questions and interpreting them. As discussed in the Literature Review, such is the interest in questioning that categorisation schemes abound but with reliability and validity issues attached.
First, there is no generally-accepted framework that offers an off-the-shelf tool for research.
Classification schemes tend to be criticised for being over-simplistic or so elaborate as to be unworkable outside, sometimes even within, their immediate context. Second, similar to the reservations over quantification, the search for the all-embracive framework often becomes more important than the data itself, as Lee (2006)  In speech and in absence of punctuation, the prime indicator of a question would be the intonation, albeit with a great deal of variation as to the pitch movement according to its pragmatic function (cf. Cruttenden, 2014, p. 294-286). Noncanonical questions are just as valid in the classroom as 'proper' interrogatives but they defy categorisation on grammatical grounds.
Of course, teachers do not use formal criteria for putting questions unless the actual language point is a specific interrogative construction or they feel they need to use a restricted range of language with a less proficient class. They select questions according to pedagogical goals and such is the rate of questioning that they must do this largely automatically and unconsciously. Even for the questions. Only lesson observation and a postobservation reflection process could link language to function through two sets of eyes, those of the researcher and the teacher. The former may be in a privileged position, the observer assuming the mantle of judge and expert, but it is the teacher as the instigator in the classroom process who holds the true key to the question of questions. For this reason, the teachers in the study were invited to present their own categorisations of their own questions and hold these up as points of departure for discussion and analysis.
The significance of the study is that questioning plays a major role in the classroom interaction process and ultimately learning, the goal of any educational process. Questioning is surely one of the strategies referred to in formulations of teacher expertise as in the section on 'sustained enhanced practice' in the Standard for Chartered Teacher in Scotland (The Scottish Government, 2009, p. 9).
While the study does not deal with the relationship between questions and learning outcomes, there is prima facie a case that a deeper understanding of the role of questions in the classroom puts teachers in a better position to exploit them as pedagogical tools. By way of transition to the next section, the literature on questioning is large but disconcertingly inconsistent in that a preoccupation with categorisation schemes is combined with a reaction against super-imposed frameworks with their limitations and presuppositions. This study highlights the data rather than classification issues so that the questions themselves become the focus.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
No studies dispute the primacy of questioning as a classroom technique. An impressive body of evidence is supplied via Hattie (2003)  With the development of ever more sophisticated techniques to deal with larger sets of data, the concern is that the methodology becomes a goal in itself. There are no grounds for saying that Hattie (2003) falls into this trap but the large-scale design does not allow any individual instances of data to be reported, in this context questions asked during lessons. Hattie has to be taken on trust and there is no recourse to the primary data.
Still, it is generally accepted in the literature that questioning is a universal and non-trivial classroom phenomenon, cf. Tsui's (2001) evaluation as part of an analysis of classroom interaction. As a negative example, Afitska (2016) reports on a project which involved observing science lessons. The weakest lessons with the poorest learning outcomes were the ones where teachers asked students no questions. The literature is chiefly concerned not with justifying questions -their value is self-evident -but categorising them. The most quoted study in an EFL context is Lynch (1991), which makes the distinction between 'display' and 'referential' questions that is still very much in currency (e.g. Ko, 2014) and is examined below.
It is posited that display questions are designed purely to elicit samples of target usage, to 'display' the language, and that the content of the response is largely irrelevant and ignored. Thompson (1997) provides a cringeworthy example: Teacher: What does your father do?  (Hart, 2010, p. 70).
The first observation is that the content and language of the answers are not predictable, hence the direction to provide lexical support. Second, the topic is stimulating, even controversial in the staid world of EFL (cf. Thornbury's (2005) criticism of materials as bland and conservative), and could encourage teenagers to participate. Third, responses are invited rather than demanded from the group and individual students are not grilled as in the previous example. The atmosphere would be more relaxed and cooperative, attributes fundamental to the humanistic framework championed above. It is unfortunate that studies which adopt the display/referential dichotomy (e.g. Toni & Parse, 2013) show the former to predominate.
However, a good guys/bad guys conceptualisation of referential and display questions is challengeable. There are major problems in even this simple categorisation schema. The formulation of a question is but a poor guide to the linguistic and cognitive response that may be evoked. There Aside from the reliability concerns in operationalising a multi-level system, there would seem a deeper theoretical objection specific to second-language learning. The developmental aspect of Bloom's framework, students being put in a position to handle increased cognitive demands, is difficult to apply because we are so far from establishing an order of language acquisition despite the, partial, empirical research in this direction (e.g. Pienemann, 1998). The display/ referential dichotomy for all its rudimentariness avoids such problems because it is a dichotomy, not a calibration. Bloom's framework has been under-utilised because it is not seen to fit into the existing knowledge base of second-language acquisition.
To summarise this literature review, the significance of teacher questioning has not been disputed, so much of the attention has turned to how questions should be categorised, the discussion largely reacting to the traditional display/referential distinction.
This has prompted an alternative approach in this study, that of including teachers in the classification activity, practitioners being most cognisant of the complexities of the interaction in their own classrooms.
'However, the basic distinction between question types is still obscure, particularly the claim that questions fall into either a classroom or real-world context, the former reflecting the formal roles of teacher and students, the latter representing them as individuals within larger society'

MATERIAL AND METHODS
The data for this small-scale study, teachers' questions, is relatively easy to collect given its volume in any teaching episode. The means is also readily suggested, namely observing lessons and recording the interaction. More problematic, as brought out in the previous section, is the analysis stage.  Is that strange?

Questions quantified and categorised by teachers
The first of these could easily be taken for the kind of empty phatic communication discussed earlier.
Annie, however, defended this as a genuine enquiry and in class the learners did react accordingly, telling some interesting anecdotes.
For Annie, questions like these were essential in building rapport with the students. She placed a high value on her relationship with individual learners, believing that this facilitated the learning process. The second question appears bizarre out of context. It was an ambitious lesson, the most cognitively challenging of the four observed, in  questions. Quizzed on this, she confessed that it was an unconscious trait but 'it put students less on the spot', presumably by stressing that the task was a shared one. Annie was conscious that such questions were demanding linguistically and content-wise so she found a way to reconcile this with her concern for learners' welfare. has gone before. This is an example of very skilful instruction, the definition being teased out and referenced to the learners' own experiences.

Doris
The least experienced teacher, Doris executed a lesson which was the closest to the communicative methodology currently most in favour (cf. the teaching manual of Harmer, 2007).
There was a great deal more interaction between learners with Doris not directly involved beyond setting the task, hence the total number of questions asked was only half that of the other teachers. It is perhaps unsurprising that this lesson was the most 'classic' methodologically. Less time had elapsed after Doris's training period and she had had less opportunity to form new habits.
Eliciting resembled Bart's Clarification category in being form-focused. The elucidation technique and appeal to meta-language ring familiar.

'Has been sailing' -what is it?
When do we use Past Perfect Simple?
When do we use Past Perfect Continuous?
The difference was that Doris's students were more proficient and she could cover more ground this way. It is instructive that the example Doris uses -'has been sailing' -was an example from her textbook. Unlike Bart and, to a lesser extent, Curt, she did not take the learners' output as a platform to build the language point. The extent of the learner interaction yielded a great deal of language Prompts. Doris explained that they were 'not really questions', more like softened imperatives. As Annie and Bart, Doris needed a way to make learners comfortable with taking on tasks.
The third category, Getting Feedback -e.g. 'What is the first one [name]?' -was similarly seen as minor, a mechanism for getting through routine parts of the lesson with minimum fuss. Doris had a strong sense of priorities and timing in the lesson observed. Some questions were worth more to the lesson than others, namely those which related most closely to the disambiguation of form.

Research aim 1
The first aim of the study was to quantify and hence verify questioning as a core tool in the classroom. The most basic finding was that questioning was a well-utilised resource. All four teachers were surprised by how many questions they asked but they gave no indication that these lessons were untypical in this aspect.

Research aim 2
The second aim of the study was to elicit from teachers a classification of their questions according to perceived pedagogical function. The teachers were unprepared for the task of categorising their own questions but they were surprisingly confident in their judgments. What sort of things do they need to be good at?
The first is a yes/no question, the second a whquestion, the third a fragment (there is no verb) fronted by a wh-element. For Bart, and this applies across all the teachers, the formal characteristics of questions were overridden by their common purpose in eliciting language and content.

Research aim 3
The third aim of this study was to compare and What do you think that the apple means?
What do you think that apples usually mean?
What else do we think of with apples?
The first question relates directly to the artwork.