We've Moved!
Visit SDSU’s new digital collections website at https://digitalcollections.sdsu.edu
Description
This study is a corpus-based investigation of questions found in academic lectures in undergraduate university classrooms, and relationships between types of question and features of the surrounding discourse, such as class size, interactivity of the class, and discipline. A combined, multifaceted framework is suggested here as a tool to consider each individual question in regard to multiple aspects of form, function, and the classroom and discourse. A corpus of 1572 question from 18 class sessions in the Michigan Corpus of Academic English (Simpson, Ovens, Briggs, & Swales 2002) is analyzed using a combined quantitative-qualitative framework. The results of this study suggest that teachers pose the vast majority of questions in the discourse, but students are proportionally more likely to ask content questions. Question use is compared across two disciplines, Humanities and Physical Science/Engineering, and no significant differences are found between content question types and discipline of the class session. Furthermore, slightly less than half of all questions are on interactional boundaries, meaning that the majority of questions are not followed by a change in speaker. Questions that require factual recall, definitions, or confirming information are the most common type of content question, and are most likely to be on an interactional boundary, suggesting that these questions play a pedagogical role in soliciting student contribution. An increased understanding of question use and types inside the university classroom can aid instructors in making conscious choices to classroom questioning practices. Likewise, academic English students and practitioners can identify potentially problematic areas and apply the results to discussions of the pragmatics of university classroom discourse.
