Respecifying Display Questions: Interactional Resources for Language Teaching

Abstract

Previous research into teachers' questions has focused on what types of questions are more conducive for developing students' communicative language use. In this regard, display questions, whose answers the teacher already knows, are considered less effective because they limit opportunities for students to use genuine language use (Long & Sato, 1983). Although the research into teacher questions has been refined in recent years, it is not certain how much we know about how display questions work, especially how they are produced and acted on in the course of classroom interaction by language teachers and students. This article uses a sequential analysis (Koshik, 2002; Markee, 2000; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, Koshik, Jacoby, & Olsher, 2002) to examine teachers' display questions. Sequential analysis considers how classroom talk is the outcome of the contingent coordination of interactional work of common understanding (Moerman & Sacks, 1971/1988). Through analysis of transcribed interaction in an English as a second language (ESL) classroom, this article argues that display questions are central resources whereby language teachers and students organize their lessons and produce language pedagogy.

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