Characteristics of Student Questions in Korean EFL Classes

This paper surveyed some characteristics and effects of student questions in Korean EFL classes which were managed by native teachers. In Korean EFL classes, students preferred asking convergent questions to divergent ones; that is, most student questions did not require high-order thinking, but sought factual or conceptual knowledge of words or idiomatic expressions. The students used unmarked simple interrogative sentences, and rarely asked questions with complex or compound sentences. Also, quite a few of the student questions were ungrammatical. In the discourse which began with student questions, more than half of the interactions were made up of Initiation-Response (IR) patterns, lacking evaluation or feedback which usually appears in teacher-initiated discourse. Student questions often contributed to the increase of classroom interactions and comprehension of sentences or lexical items through negotiation of meaning. The native instructors often used them as scaffolding for providing other associated or related knowledge. Student questions were of some help in estimating their level of grammatical knowledge or speaking ability. (Naval Academy)