Teacher questions in English medium instruction classrooms in a Turkish higher education setting

Abstract

This article presents a qualitative study investigating the lecturers’ questions in various English medium instruction (EMI) courses in a Turkish higher education (HE) setting following a social interactionist perspective. More specifically, the study focuses on a comprehensive investigation of lecturer questions in terms of the scope of talk, typology, contingency, the convergence-divergence according to the taxonomy of Boyd (2015). Nineteen hours of EMI lessons from ten different content courses were video-recorded. The findings demonstrated that the most frequent questioning by the lecturers was carried out in mathematics and engineering courses in which more dominance by lecturers’ questioning in classroom discourse was observed. Additionally, results revealed that the EMI lecturers mostly used text-based, display, and convergent questions, which resulted in restricted interaction in classes. As an implication, the study unpacked a need to train EMI lecturers in classroom discourse competence to use the questions more functionally for student involvement in classroom interaction.