The Role of effective questioning in fostering classroom discussion

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Date
2014
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university of Oum-El-Bouaghi
Abstract
This study attempts to examine the effectiveness of questioning in fostering classroom discussion, the case of first year University English Students. It aims at checking out whether effective questioning would boost up the learners' engagement in discussion or not. Mainly, the current study attempted to answer the following question: Do teachers' open-ended questions affect the students' class discussion? To answer this question, we relied on the descriptive method via the use of two questionnaires which have been submitted to teachers and learners at the department of english, Larbi Ben M'Hidi university, Oum-El-Bouaghi during the academic year 2013/2014, to gather the necessary data about their views towards the current research. The analysis of the two questionnaires revealed that classroom discussion can be a handy teaching and learning tool if it is used cooperatively with effective questioning especially with open-ended questions that provide learners with different responses to make classroom discussion more effective. Furthermore, this study sheds light on the main reasons behind students' reluctance to raise/ answer questions either because of the fear of making mistakes or the lack of linguistic abilities which were recorded as the chief impediments of discussion. On the basis of these findings, pedagogical implications are suggested for both students and teachers in order to improve the learning process in general and to foster classroom discussion in particular via effective questioning mainly by using open-ended questions.
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Keywords
Fostering classroom : questioning
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