Distinguished Professor, Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University

Title: The Power of Questioning in L2 Chinese Classrooms

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Abstract

As Nunan indicates (1990), teacher talk is of crucial importance of classroom organization and management, since it is the language that teachers use to interact with students in class. Long (1983) further suggests several ways that input can be made comprehensible. One way is through the modification of the interactional structure of conversation. In doing so, an interdependent relationship should exist between the competent speaker (i.e., native speaker, NS) and the less competent speaker (i.e., nonnative speaker, NNS). In order to complete the task, each participant needs to convey and obtain unknown information from the other person. Questions are often then asked during the negotiation in class (Hu, 2010; Hu & Li, 2017; Hu & Duan, 2018). According to Long, questions are the dominant form used by NSs when addressing NNSs in informal settings. NS’s frequent use of questions can be attributed to a number of functions that questions serve to facilitate and sustain participation by the NNS. Certain kinds of questions, for example, Yes/No and “or-choice” questions, are found to be particularly easy for the NNS (Brock, 1986). In other words, the NS’s questions function as scaffolds that make it possible for the NNS to participate in verbal interaction that is beyond his/her current second language repertoire (Cao, 2016; Dong et al., 2017). In this talk, I will discuss teacher and student questioning in the classrooms of Chinese as a second language (CSL). I will also classify questions 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). Finally, I will present the results obtained from an interview and a questionnaire about students’ attitudes toward questioning and speaking in class that support the effectiveness of questioning in helping learners gain a better understanding of a target language.

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Bio

Chun-yin Doris Chen is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). With a two-year fellowship from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), a two-year research assistantship, and a one-year scholarship from Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, she received from the UIUC her Master’s degree in linguistics in 1988 and PhD in 1991.

Her dissertation entitled Reindexing and Some Asymmetries in Universal Grammar demonstrated her strong interest in Chomskyan approach to language. Ever since she joined NTNU, her research interests have gradually shifted from syntax to first/second language acquisition, teaching Chinese as a second language, syntax–semantics interface, speech acts, and English language assessment. She has worked on various acquisition topics in Chinese, such as pro-drop, topic-construction, reflexivization, ba-construction, bei-construction, and published a book, A Study of Second Language Classrooms (2011), which received the Outstanding Book Award from NTNU. Most of her works can be found in refereed journals such as Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, Taiwan Journal of Linguistics, Chinese Teaching and Learning, Chinese Studies, English Teaching and Learning, Intercultural Pragmatics, etc.

Her service to the field of linguistics includes membership on the advisory councils of foundation projects on L2 Chinese language policy, and refereeing for grant proposals, conferences, and journals. She was elected to the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of Taiwan and served as the President for two years (2012-2014). She was the editor-in-chief of Concentric: Studies in Linguistics. And she served as the convener of the Linguistics Division at the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan from 2016 to 2018.