A CORPUS ANALYSIS OF TEACHER-LED ENGLISH QUESTIONS IN TAIWAN SECONDARY CLIL CLASSROOMS

A CORPUS ANALYSIS OF TEACHER-LED ENGLISH QUESTIONS IN TAIWAN SECONDARY CLIL CLASSROOMS

Teacher-led questions are paramount when teachers seek to impart knowledge and ensure students understand the subject. They help teachers to guide meaningful interactions, make their students more active and influence their thinking, reasoning and participation. Surprisingly, however, there has been little research on analysing teacher questioning in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms in Asian EFL contexts at the secondary level. Therefore, our study aimed to analyse the frequency and types of questions used by CLIL teachers in Taiwanese classrooms, believing that this would help us understand teacher-student interaction and scaffold our teaching, students’learning and content learning. A corpus of 1,405 minutes from 39 CLIL lessons was collected and analysed. The results show that teachers use display, referential and confirmation checks in CLIL classrooms, raising doubts about achieving intended pedagogical goals and challenging learners’cognitive development. Teacher gender, learner level and course duration also significantly influence the questions used in the classroom. The pedagogical implications of the research are to raise CLIL teachers’awareness of the importance of questioning, translanguaging, L1/L2 translation and multimodalities to support better interactive discourse in CLIL classrooms and to provide adequate professional development for CLIL practitioners on classroom questioning skills to facilitate interaction, participation and deeper learning.