ELT Students’ Use of Teacher Questions in Peer Teaching

Classrooms are recognised as social contexts, with often clearly defined role relationships. Teacher-student and student-student interactions in a classroom are essential since this is when learning takes place. This is more valid for language classrooms, where the teacher language serves a number of purposes such as organising learning, providing meaningful input, controlling and eliciting learner output, amongst others. It is not surprising, therefore, that language teachers often modify their language in the classroom to optimize learning. With the classroom discourse playing a fundamental role in language classrooms, classroom discourse and teacher talk has been subject to inquiry. The purpose is both to understand the nature of language classroom as a social context and to improve teaching/learning process through making optimal use of the target language in the classroom. This study adds to the body of study looking into classroom discourse, but in a simulated micro-teaching setting. Specifically, this talk will report the findings of an ongoing research project on the use of teacher questions by ELT students in a Turkish state university. As a partial requirement for some of their courses in their pre-service training, ELT students do micro-teachings where they plan and teach a lesson to their peers. In this study, 60 students’ micro-teachings for two courses have been recorded for four academic terms; and student teachers’ use of questions has been analysed. The initial findings show that student teachers use questions for organising the learning environment more than for eliciting meaningful output or scaffolding the language. The findings will have implications for pre-service teacher education programmes as well as in-service training.