ABSTRACT

In classroom teaching, where teachers front a large class of students, opportunities for students to talk are limited, with much classroom talk by students involving answering teacher questions. This raises the question of how teachers promote student engagement in their lessons. Using a 394,671-word corpus of recorded teaching in vocational education, this study investigates a discourse feature of classroom discourse, the use of tag questions. Our study compares the use of tag questions in two teaching contexts: teacher-fronted whole-class teaching in the classroom and teaching through interacting with individuals or pairs during skills-teaching in the workshop or construction site. Every tag question (755) in this corpus was analysed for polarity, position in turn, intonation and speech function. The study shows the importance of tag questions in both contexts in involving students in the instructors’ on-going explanations both in silent thought and through brief verbal responses or actions. Instructors also use tag questions to focus students’ attention, to ensure that students are following their explanations, to involve students in problem-solving, to seek information about students’ practical work, to remind them of known information, and to construct them as co-experts who already have some knowledge and judgement related to their vocational field.

摘要

在课堂教学中，教师面对一大群学生，学生交谈的机会有限，学生的课堂谈话大多涉及回答教师的问题。这就提出了教师如何促进学生参与课堂的问题。本研究使用一个 394,671 字的职业教育教学记录语料库，调查课堂话语的话语特征，即标签问题的使用。我们的研究比较了标签问题在两种教学环境中的使用：在课堂上以教师为主导的全班教学，以及在车间或建筑工地的技能教学中通过与个人或配对互动进行教学。该语料库中的每个标签问题 (755) 都分析了极性、依次位置、语调和语音功能。该研究表明，在这两种情况下，标记问题的重要性在于让学生参与到教师正在进行的解释中，无论是在沉默的思考中还是通过简短的口头反应或行动。教师还使用标签问题来集中学生的注意力，确保学生听从他们的解释，让学生参与解决问题，寻找学生实际工作的信息，提醒他们已知的信息，并将他们构建为- 已经具备与其职业领域相关的知识和判断力的专家。