Examining teacher questioning in English-medium instruction classrooms : a four-tier analytical procedure

Abstract

Questions asked by teachers in English-medium instruction (EMI) classrooms are widely recognized as crucial in mediating language and content learning. Nonetheless, studies on EMI classroom discourse have rarely attempted a comprehensive conceptualization of teacher questioning or an analytical model to operationalize such a conceptualization. Drawing on a conceptual framework that characterizes teacher questions in terms of cognitive demand and interactional orientation, this paper proposes a methodological and analytical procedure that allows the systematic examination and comparison of the productivity of teacher questions across different classroom contexts and promotes the rigor of research on teacher questioning. Baseline data collected for a larger multi-phase research project investigating the effectiveness of a professional development program are used to illustrate how each of the four tiers in the analytical procedure operates and what analytical work is done at each tier. The paper concludes by inviting classroom discourse researchers to use this multi-layered analytical framework to investigate the productivity of teacher questioning in the complex ecology of naturalistic classroom discourse rigorously and to further expand our conceptualization by integrating more aspects of teacher questions.