Teachers’ questions: open, closed and half‐open

Summary

Question‐and‐answer sessions are a ubiquitous feature of classroom life, and recent research as well as the prescriptive advice given to practising teachers stress the importance of teachers’ questioning techniques. This paper seeks to demonstrate that, whilst these questioning techniques undoubtedly affect pupil conduct, the pupils’ responses to questions in their turn influence the teachers’ behaviour and the strategies they adopt. As part of this analysis, the concept of the half‐open question is developed: the half‐open question both solves a practical problem of coding teachers’ questioning techniques and throws light on the dynamics of teacher‐pupil interactions. It is also argued that an adequate understanding of question‐and‐answer sessions requires an alliance between the two main perspectives on classroom observation, those of ethnographic observation and systematic observation.