From Input to Output: A Case Study of CSL Classroom Questioning

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to examine teacher and student questioning in CSL classrooms. Our participants were six classes of L2 learners of Chinese studying at the Mandarin Training Center of National Taiwan Normal University, further divided into three levels (beginning, intermediate and advanced) together with six CSL teachers. Teacher and student questioning was videotaped and recorded via classroom observations. All the questions used in questioning were further classified by their syntactic types (such as disjoined questions, A-not-A questions, tag questions, particle questions, and wh-questions) and pragmatic functions (such as referential and. display). A questionnaire about questioning and class climate was designed followed by an interview. The results showed that the teachers in the present study utilized questioning to elicit L2 learners' output by using particle questions and wh-questions most frequently. This finding matched those of student questions, indicating that input enhancement was influential (White et al., 1991; Izumi, 2002) and that our students, as Johnson-Farris (1995) indicates, attempted to be understood by questioning.