Classroom Questioning: Pre-Service EFL Teachers' Questioning and Modification Strategies

One of the most important keys to create an interactive language classroom is initiation of interaction by the teacher. In order to foster interaction in foreign language classrooms, "questioning" is known as one of the effective ways. However, asking lots of questions in foreign language classrooms does not guarantee stimulation of interaction for language teachers. Thus, the quality of the questioning strategies employed by foreign language teachers has of significance. The present study takes exploratory-descriptive inquiry into research issue under investigation and sets out to search teacher questions posed in EFL classrooms in Turkey. The participants of the study are 10 senior pre-service EFL teachers. The data is gathered by means of observation, field-notes and audio-recordings of classroom observations held in secondary school classrooms. The results reveal that Turkish pre-service EFL teachers mostly use display questions and use modification strategies like rephrasing, simplification, repetition, decomposition, and probing. However, they have challenges when sequencing questions. They tend to ask many things at a time or prefer very general questions. They fail when giving prompts, clues or examples and they tend to reply to their own questions. The present study offers some implications for teacher education programs to increase the quality of pre-service teacher training.