The Language Teacher
05 - 2001

What We Preach? Stated Beliefs about Communicative Language Teaching and Classroom
Questioning Strategies

Nigel Cundale

Anglo Mexican Cultural Institute, Puebla, Mexico


In recent years there has been a reconceptualization of what teaching really is, from a view that it involves the mastery of a limited number of technical skills (how to present language, how to ask questions, how to give feedback, etc.) to a belief that it involves a continuous process of critical reflection (Schon 1983, Richards & Lockhart 1996). Thus, the teacher is no longer someone who has to learn a craft, but rather a professional who has to develop the ability to critically analyze what he or she does in the classroom. However, the ability to reflect is not innate, so the question is how can we facilitate this?

This paper refers to a collaborative investigation carried out with two teachers at the Anglo Mexican Cultural Institute (Puebla), which aimed to identify the types of questions they ask their students. These findings were then compared to their stated beliefs about CLT. The question I wished to answer was do they practice what they preach?

A Basic Typology of Questions

Teachers ask a great number of questions in their lessons and each question can be seen as setting up a mini-learning task. For this reason, the type of questions we ask impact heavily on the learning process. Teachers' questions can be categorized in many ways; one of the most useful is outlined below.

Display questions

Display questions are also referred to as known information questions, i.e. the teacher already knows the answer but asks to check that the student can produce it. Examples of typical display questions include:

What is the past tense of the verb to come?

What does the text tell us about the man?

Can you use since with past simple?

Is true the answer to question 3?

As these examples show, display questions can be closed (the answer is yes or no) or open. Their purpose is exclusively pedagogical, they are intended to check learning, and, for this reason, they are rarely found in discourse outside the classroom. In answering such questions, the student has limited scope. Specific information is expected in the reply, and in linguistic terms, many display questions are answered with a word or phrase, especially those of the closed variety. Display questions normally require the respondent to produce the right answer, and as Tsui (1996) points out, this itself may generate more anxiety and less participation.

Referential questions

Here, the questioner does not know the answer to the question and there is a genuine exchange of information. The focus is on what is said, not on how it is said. Examples of how referential questions might be used in the classroom follow:

Which Mexican cities do you find attractive?

Why don't you like visiting zoos?

Have you been on holiday abroad?

Is learning English going to be useful for you in your job?

The answer to these questions would be difficult to predict as they refer to personal experiences, attitudes, opinions and so on. They demand more of the respondent cognitively (they are not simply trying to recall the right answer) and give the opportunity for a more extended answer, using a wider range of linguistic resources. However, it should be noted that referential questions can also be closed and quite possibly answered with one word. Later reference will be made to whether this does in fact happen.

In answering a referential question, learners may be pushed to use language at the limits of their competence in order to make their output comprehensible (Swain 1985). Additionally, listeners frequently request clarification and ask questions to check understanding in an effort to make input comprehensible (Long 1983). Both processes are regarded as particularly helpful in promoting language acquisition.

I believe the nature of teacher questions has a great influence on the way classes develop. A reliance on display questions is likely to see form and accuracy emerge as dominant features of a lesson. A preference for referential questions is likely to see meaning and fluency prevail. My standpoint is simple. A teacher who professes to be communicative should use a substantial number of referential questions.

The Importance of Questions in the Second Language Classroom

There is a considerable history of studying questions in general education, but surprisingly the first study in ESL/EFL was much more recent (Long & Sato 1983). This is even more surprising given that questions are easy to observe and record and are amenable to quantitative analysis. Questions can be viewed as important from a number of perspectives.

Firstly, in educational terms, questions serve a number of purposes, most notably (a) encourage student involvement in learning, (b) help weaker students participate, (c) help elicit particular structures and vocabulary, (d) stimulate thinking, and (e) enable teachers to check student understanding (Richards and Lockhart 1996:185).

Questions are also important, in that they represent a major source of a student's linguistic input. White and Lightbown (1984) recorded a teacher asking 427 questions in a single 50-minute class. Presumably this is not typical of questioning patterns in all classrooms, but, undoubtedly, questions represent a key aspect of teacher talk. With input being widely accepted as an essential prerequisite for language learning, it is no exaggeration to conclude that the nature of teacher's questions, per se, has a direct impact on second language acquisition.

Simply being exposed to language, though, is not enough. We also need the opportunity to use it in meaningful interaction. This point was highlighted by Long & Sato (1983:270), who state that,
Access to comprehensible input and opportunities to use the target language for communicative purposes are probably the minimum requirements for successful classroom second language acquisition.

Teachers who constantly use display questions deprive their students of the chance to use language meaningfully; that will have a considerable impact on their learning. Having outlined a basic typology of teachers' questions and indicated their role in classroom language learning, I would now like to turn to the study that forms the basis of this paper.

The Study

I worked with two teachers from the Anglo Mexican Cultural Institute (Puebla), a private language school. The teachers observed, Alberto and Laura (to protect identities, pseudonyms are used), have a very similar professional profile, both having 7 years teaching experience and the Cambridge University COTE (Certificate for Overseas Teachers of English) qualification. During previous classroom observations, in my role as their supervisor, I noticed that they favored the use of more meaning-focused activities, rather than those predominantly concerned with form. The initial stage of my investigation was to interview them separately about their views on CLT. A number of their comments are listed below.

Alberto:

Communicative language teaching is allowing students to express what they want to express. It doesn't matter how they say it.

There should be a focus on the exchange of information.

I like to ask them questions about themselves, about things nobody knows.

Laura:

In communicative language teaching the students are not just paying attention to the form, they're paying attention to the content.

Focusing on grammar alone is not enough. To learn a language you need to really use it.

I would say that I'm communicative in my teaching.

So, we can conclude, on the basis of these espoused beliefs, that both teachers are in favor of a communicative approach to teaching and profess to incorporate such principles in their
lessons.

To conclude the interview, I confirmed that I would like to observe each of them compare their stated beliefs with the type of questions they ask in class. I made no reference to how I would classify their questions. There may be those who would claim that revealing the focus of my study led to the teachers adopting untypical questioning strategies, producing unreliable data. This was an outcome I considered, but I believe that a hidden agenda is incompatible with a collaborative study of this nature and, in addition, during post-observation meetings with the teachers, to share data, it was evident that they had not considered the categories I had used.

The Observation

Alberto was working with a group of 12 young adults studying at the upper intermediate level. During my observation, Alberto combined group discussions about ecology with two accuracy-focused activities (a cloze and error correcting a paragraph. Laura was teaching a group of 9 pre-intermediate students, all of whom were young adults, who studied examples of letters requesting and giving advice, discussing both the content of the texts and the use of should and ought to. The first hour of their lessons was recorded and analyzed. During the observation, I noted the type of questions they asked while in lockstep mode, that is, with the teacher addressing the whole group, and classified them into one of four categories: (a) open referential questions (b) closed referential questions, (c) open display questions, (d) closed display questions.
Theoretically, since referential questions involve the exchange of information, they should occur more frequently in a lesson with a communicative focus. In addition, as open questions provide the respondent with the greatest opportunity to participate, these should also be used extensively. Thus, when I entered my observation, I was interested to see how closely these theoretical assumptions related to my two subjects' classroom performance.

The Data

The data collected are shown in Table 1.

Table 1
 

 Referential

 Display
 

 Open

 Closed

 Open

 Closed
 Alberto

 11

 11

 9

 1
 Laura

 14

 7

 15

 1

Interestingly, both teachers asked approximately the same number of questions, 32 for Alberto and 37 for Laura. Alberto asked 69% referential questions, Laura 57%. Alberto used a greater number of closed questions, 37% of all his questions, compared with 22% for Laura. Beyond these distinctions, perhaps the most notable statistic is that each teacher used only one closed display question, theoretically the question type that restricts classroom discourse most.

The day after the observation I met with the teachers, individually, to show them the data I had collected and to ask if they were in agreement with it. We then discussed the implications of my data; I will refer to these discussions subsequently.

An Evaluation of the Questioning Strategies Recorded

In this section I will try to answer the question I had previously set myself. Do Alberto and Laura use questioning strategies that reflect their stated beliefs about CLT? In fact, answering this question with any type of certainty is extremely difficult, as there is no agreed benchmark to indicate what a communicative mix of question types is. Given this situation, what can be done is to compare the data with that from similar previous investigations. Long & Sato (1983: 280) recorded 14% of teachers' questions as being referential (the remainder being display questions), while Brock (1986: 53) gave a figure of 17% in her control group. Neither study distinguished between open and closed questions. In this light, we can say that during their observations Alberto and Laura placed a greater emphasis on the use of referential questions. In addition, both favored the use of open questions. On the basis of the data collected, we can say that their teaching practice is in accord with their stated beliefs.

Identifying Good Practice

Behind my desire to investigate the questioning strategies used by teachers in the classroom was an interest in looking into the issue of whether we could establish if there was an ideal balance between display and referential questions. I would like to address this matter now.

The issue as to what type of classroom discourse/questioning is the ideal has been considered by a number of researchers and practitioners. Seedhouse (1996) takes the view that since the primary role of the teacher is to help students achieve specific pedagogical goals, the use of display questions and initiation-response-feedback chains (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975) is perfectly natural and justifiable. In fact, he goes further and suggests that:

A paradoxical institutional aim of communicative language teaching is to produce non-institutional discourse in an institutional setting. (Seedhouse 1996: 22)

Both Nunan (1987) and Thornbury (1996) are implicitly critical of teachers who claim to be communicative, but in reality rely on the overuse of display questions and a focus on form. They propose the introduction of more naturalistic patterns of discourse in the classroom. Thus, for them, the greater use of referential questions is highly desirable.

Cullen (1998) to some extent takes a more practical middle way. He rejects the approach whereby classroom discourse is compared to naturalistic discourse in order to decide if it is communicative. He views classroom discourse as unique, concerned as it is with promoting learning, with the teacher in the dual role of interlocutor and instructor. In his view, the patterns that are witnessed there need to be evaluated in this light. So, when we are investigating and evaluating classroom discourse, this should be done with reference to the specific nature of classroom-based second language learning. There is an evident need for a blend of both display questions, to check understanding and learning, and referential questions, to encourage the use of more varied and complex language. However, specifying exact percentages would be arbitrary in the extreme.

Insights Acquired During the Investigation

During the recording of the data, I was able to acquire my own insights into the nature of teachers' questions and their relationship with classroom discourse. Here, I will outline the most important.

(1) It is easy to believe that closed questions restrict the length of responses, but it seems that teachers use this type of question to elicit a student turn, and several of those I observed were longer than a single sentence. Extract 1, taken from Alberto's class, provides an example of this. Here, students were discussing travelling in bad weather.

Extract 1
 S1  So we tried to continue to Cuetzalan, but it was impossible.
 T  Ivan, have you ever had a similar experience?
 S2  Nothing so bad. My worse experience was driving to Jalapa in the fog.
It was very dangerous and I drive . . . had to drive carefully

Interestingly, Richards, too, found that closed questions rarely produce a simple yes/no response, either with, or without, the repetition of the auxiliary. In his study, only 20% of questions were answered this way by native speakers (1985: 97).

(2) My second finding was that even though teachers may be focusing on information that is shared by the group, students still take opportunities to introduce referential information. In Extract 2, also from Alberto's class, he was concluding a question and answer session to recall a text students had read the day before.

Extract 2

 T  So, the atmosphere was covered by dust. As a result of this, the plants died and the dinosaurs didn't have anything to eat. Yeah?
 S1  This may sound ridiculous, but I think it wasn't healthy for animals to live with all that dust.
 T  Yeah, I don't think it's ridiculous. I think it's very reasonable.

So, known and new information can be juxtapositional in classroom discourse, rather than being separated, as we might think.

(3) Next, I found that we can not always satisfactorily categorize questions as entirely display, or referential in nature. When Laura was checking students' understanding of problem page letter, she asked the following question.

So, what advice would you give the parents?

During our post-observation meeting I asked Laura if she could confirm whether the question was display in nature and she replied:

Part of the answer was predictable as the situation was set by the text, but students often add their own ideas too.

(4) A further point that occurred to me was that the statistics I collected did not always truly reflect the interaction that took place in the classroom. For example, both teachers used short, intensive periods of display questions to check students' understanding of reading texts. These lasted barely a few minutes, and did not affect the fact that the class was in general meaning-focused. However, during this episode a great number of display questions were recorded, creating a different impression.

(5) What all of the above indicates is that, while we can analyze the type of questions a teacher asks in a variety of ways, there is a danger of being too deterministic and prescriptive. This was a point made by van Lier (1988: 224), who commented,

An analysis must go beyond simple distinctions as display and referential questions, yes/no and open-ended questions, and so on, to investigate what different tasks questions set, and the different commitments they place on the answerer.

However, examining question types can be very useful, and both teachers expressed an interest in investigating this matter further. Their comments are included below:

Alberto: What I can do is what you did. Record one of my classes and analyze the data.

Laura: I'm becoming more aware of the questions I use, both when I'm planning classes and when I'm teaching.

For me, carrying out the investigation enabled me to acquire a deeper understanding of how teachers' questions affect the development of classroom discourse. At an instinctive level, I previously believed that they were a powerful influence, and having the opportunity to closely observe their impact was very rewarding personally. In addition, carrying out this research sharpened my awareness of how complex a place the classroom is. While isolating a limited number of variables helped me focus more effectively on my chosen area of investigation, the fact that so many other variables were excluded left me feeling that my study was only a first step in understanding the issues involved. For example, remaining doubts that I have include:

These are factors that could usefully be followed up in future research.

Implications

While the study reported here was on a small scale and cannot be said to have produced definitive findings, a range of practical implications can be identified. Firstly, it is important that teachers recognize the fundamental role their questions play in structuring the learning process. Having done this, teachers then need to be aware of the type of questions they ask in their lessons. This can be achieved through recording lessons, or by having a peer, or supervisor, sit in and keep a tally.

Once a picture emerges of the balance of display and referential questions being used, teachers may wish to look at altering that balance and note the impact this has on the way classroom discourse develops. This, in itself, will reveal how learning is being approached, primarily through a focus on accuracy or fluency. Finally, by following such a process of critical reflection teachers will be in a stronger position to identify appropriate professional practice for their own particular teaching situation.

Conclusion

In undertaking this classroom-based research, my aim was to identify how closely teachers' beliefs and practice matched. Both my subjects used a majority of referential questions and favored the use of open over closed questions. On the basis of this, we can say that they do indeed practice what they preach. What we cannot say is how close to, or far from, the ideal their questioning strategies were. Teaching, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint, is too complex for such deterministic statements to carry much weight.

References

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Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In S. Gass & S. Madden (Eds). Input in second language acquisition. Rowley, Mass: Newbury House.

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Tsui, A.B.M. (1996). Reticence and anxiety in second language learning. In K.M.Bailey & D. Nunan (Eds.). Voices from the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Van Lier, L. (1988). The classroom and the language learner. Harlow, England:Longman.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tony Wright and the two anonymous JALT reviewers for their comments on a previous draft of this paper.


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