作者：Wenxiao Li
It is admitted that teacher-student interaction plays a significant role in improving teaching quality and triggering students’ interests in an EFL class. According to Long and Sato （1983）， the most appealing approach to start a teacher-student interaction is questioning. In terms of China， questioning is used even more frequently than in other parts of the world （Zheng， 1997）. Under this circumstance， I conducted a secondary classroom-research with the regard of the questioning， To be more specific， I intends to study the efficiency of question type on teacher-student interactions in EFL classrooms and draw a conclusion through analyzing students’ responses to different types of questioning.
Before I move to the major findings of my mini research， there are several previous research and relevant theories that I would like to point out. Firstly， according to Ur （1996），， there were six factors that should be considered when evaluating the efficiency of a question： clarity， learning value， interest， availability， extension and teacher reaction. It is believed that through analyzing students’ responses from the six aspects scholars were supposed to test the quality of students’ answers. Based on Ur’s （1996） framework， Hu （2007） reinforces the consideration from students’ perspective， which， to be more specific， is students’ input and output during the questioning. Hu （2007） evaluated students’ responses based on students’ preparing time and students’ talking time， reflecting students’ language input and output respectively. Based on the theories and opinions mentioned above， this mini research would analyze the effect of teachers’ question from Six factors proposed by Ur （1996）. During the analysis， besides the interactional analysis of teacher-student interaction in the questioning， C-unit is used as major measurement of students’ output. C-unit， according to Forster （1998）， refers to a kind of meaning unit in talks which could be a word， a phrase or a sentence. The reason why C-unit is involved lies in the frequency of the elliptical sentences using in teacher-student interactions. Those elliptical sentences are not complete sentence but serve as a more natural way to express one’s opinion. Therefore， according to Forster （1998）， it would be better to use C-unit to measure language output under such condition.
The data used in this research are from six videos from the SELEP National Foreign Language Teaching Contest. Six English teachers’ classes were chosen from 174 teachers who participated in the final match of the SFLEP National Foreign Language Teaching Contest were selected to be participants. Factors like gender， award， background and teaching content were taken into consideration when the teachers were selected. Because of the requirements of the contest， every class was about 20 minutes and had 15 students participating in there. To make data comparable， the six participants were chosen from three groups： English Literature， Business English and Comprehensive English， which means there were two teachers from each group respectively.
