Questions in EFL Teachers Classroom Discourse: An Investigation of Question-and-Answer Dynamics

Questions are a salient part of teacher classroom discourse. To explore the instructional functions of question as the teachers’ discoursal resource, this study examined how EFL teachers deploy questions to stimulate students’ thinking, recognize their current level of learning, and allow answers to inform pedagogical decisions. Teachers’ classroom talks in seven elementary EFL classes in different language institutes, yielded about 10.5 hours of data, were recorded and transcribed. Content analysis of the transcripts was conducted based on different classroom episodes and Richards and Lockhart s (1994) typology of procedural, convergent, and divergent questions and individual, coral, no-answer, and teacher answers. The results showed that the majority of question types asked by the teachers were convergent, low-cognitive questions and a high proportion of answer types elicited by the teachers were individual answers. Although the main focus of teacher questions was convergent questions which were used to understand the current level of learners’ language ability, the teachers asked divergent questions to engage students in high-order thinking and to increase their world knowledge. Moreover, the findings showed that the individual answer was the most common type of answers elicited by the teachers to assess students knowledge, make them think about the questions, and involve them actively in the question-answer dynamics. These findings show that the question-answer dynamics is a recurrent phenomenon in classroom discourse.