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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background
In traditional Chinese classroom, it was normal for students to remain reticent inclass and only teachers did the talking because student reticence was regarded as asign of courtesy and respect for teachers. However, in the early 1990s, with theintroduction of communicative language teaching approach in China, more and moreteachers of foreign languages began to shift their focus from teachers' lectures toclassroom interaction. Over the past decades, communicative language teachingapproach contributes a lot to the new relationship between teachers and students inChina's EFL classroom. Teachers, used to be the mechanical transmitter of textbook，now serve the role of students' partners in their road of improving their languagecompetence.

在中国传统的教室，为学生留在课堂上沉默寡言，说话，因为只有教师做学生的沉默被视为礼貌和尊重教师的一个标志，这是正常的。然而，在20世纪90年代初，在中国交际语言教学方法引进，越来越多的外语教师开始转移他们的焦点从教师讲课课堂互动。在过去的几十年里，交际语言教学方法作出了巨大贡献，在中国的英语课堂中教师和学生之间的新关系。用机械发射的教科书，教师，服务学生的合作伙伴，他们的道路，提高他们的语言能力的作用。

According to Brown，teachers' questions provide necessary steppingstones to communication in second language classrooms (Brown, 1994). Gall citedseveral studies in which teachers employed 64 to 180 questions in one class period(Gall, 1970). It can be seen that classroom interaction is mainly achieved throughteachers' questions and students，answers. Despite a big progress has been made inthe roles of teachers and students at China's EFL classroom, the commonphenomenon of student reticence still prevails. That is，teachers focus more onlectures than classroom activities and students hesitate to participate in the classroomactivities, featuring that many students are not active when answering teachers'questions even when they do know the answers. But, the nature of language is forcommunication, and the primary aim of learning a language is to be able tocommunicate with it. Without frequent oral practice, it is difficult to improve one'soral proficiency and communicative competence. It also can be learned from whatSwain put, “we leam to read by reading, so also do we learn to speak by speaking.”(Swain, 1985)

To make the classroom more communicative, many researches have been donein the field of classroom discourse in the hope of facilitating language learning andacquisition in classroom. One focused aspect is teacher talk. Teacher talk played a dominant role in the procedure of teaching programs and in the course of learning aswell, pointed out by David Nunan (1991). He believed that teacher talk was of crucialimportance, not only for the organization of the classroom but also for the process ofacquisition. As a key aspect of teacher talk，teachers' questions represent a majorsource of students' linguistic input. According to classroom observation, teacherquestioning is one of the most often used teaching techniques (Kim & Kellough,1987) and it is viewed as the second most dominant instructional strategy followinglecture (Freiberg & Driscoll，1996). A widely accepted belief is that in order to teachwell, one must be able to question well (Brualdi, 1988). Teachers' questions, firstlystudied by R. Stevens in 1912, have been “regarded as the core of effective teaching"(Jin Chuanbao, 1997:54). Because of the extensive application and vital importance,it has also been viewed as “the focus of research attention in language classrooms formany years’，(Nunan, 19本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。