An Analysis of teachers' questions: Towards the development of an in-service program for language teachers of Ateneo De Zamboanga

Date of Publication

1999

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English Language Education Major in English for Specific Purposes

Subject Categories

Teacher Education and Professional Development

College

Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC College of Education

Department/Unit

English and Applied Linguistics

Thesis Adviser

Andrea H. Penaflorida

Defense Panel Chair

Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista

Defense Panel Member

Emma F. Castillo

Teodoro Llamzon

Abstract/Summary

This study seeks to analyze teachers' questions, a significant component of classroom interaction, with the end goal of finding ways to improve language instruction in the target institution, the Ateneo de Zamboanga.Transcipts of the interaction between five teachers in the Language Department and their respective classes served as the corpus for the study. The research framework used for analyzing the data was a modification of the taxonomies of Bloom, Guznak and Barret. In addition, a survey questionnaire was given to teachers in the department.The study revealed that in the English classes (both language and literature) of the Ateneo de Zamboanga classroom interaction was generally and still predominantly teacher-centered and teacher-dominated. Only a fraction of the teacher-talk component comprised of questions. A significant number of these questions were found to be of low cognitive levels such as knowledge or mere recall and comprehension or literal understanding. On the question of teachers' level of awareness of the different types and functions of questions, it was found that such awareness was not concretely translated in the manner they conducted their classes. Furthermore, this study has found that the subjects of the study rarely, if at all, used the conventional question structure of what-where-when-why-how or the auxiliary question stems of do-does-did and has-have-had. Instead, their questions were fill-in-the-blanks structure, where teachers uttered statements, left out terms or phrases and replaced it with an interrogative inflection in their voice.

An in-service program that sought to address the problem areas identified in the study was developed. The program consisted of three sets of one-day workshops on questioning techniques.

Abstract Format

html

Language

English

Format

Print

Accession Number

TG02972

Shelf Location

Archives, The Learning Commons, 12F Henry Sy Sr. Hall

Physical Description

95 numb. leaves

Keywords

School improvement programs; Language teachers; Interaction analysis in education; Language and languages-- Study and teaching; Questioning

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