Questioning techniques for promoting language learning with students of limited L2 oral proficiency in a drama-oriented language classroom

Abstract

In drama-oriented English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms, teachers often ask questions to shape the story, unveil the details, sequence the scenes, create a beneficial linguistic environment to elicit student output and promote meaning negotiation in the target language. This study investigates how instructional goals were achieved in an intensive summer course with a group of Taiwanese college students. The course aimed to help students with beginning to low-intermediate oral proficiency improve their overall English competence through various drama activities. Eight question functions were used to analyse the classroom data. The analyses show that the teachers raised inform questions extensively to seek new information and content contribution from the students to build up drama scenes. To help students cope with linguistic insufficiency, the teachers also used pseudo, confirming, and clarifying questions to remodel the students’ segmental, inaudible or ungrammatical utterances. Different questioning patterns were found when the teachers were in-role and out-of-role. The findings show that EFL drama activities facilitate more interactive questioning than traditional approaches in which pseudo questions and those which check understanding appear most frequently. The study concludes that content areas and linguistic elements can be handled through appropriate questioning techniques in order to help low-level learners carry out natural interaction in an EFL classroom

Keywords:

• teacher questioning
• questioning techniques and functions
• teacher-in-role
• process drama
• EFL teaching