Relations Between Teacher Questioning and Student Talk in One Elementary ELL Classroom

The purpose of this article is to raise awareness of how the varied form and responsive and response-able use of teacher questions can invite and direct not only more student talk in classrooms but elicit specific and varied features of student talk that enhance comprehension building and provide evidence of student engagement and high-level thinking. I examine one teacher’s questioning patterns and their relationship with types of student talk and learning in an elementary English language learning (ELL) classroom. I focus on two lessons, purposefully selected for differing student talk outcomes. I present a comparative look at descriptive statistics detailing teacher questioning patterning (in terms of typology, contingency, convergence-divergence, textual, extra-textual). I then illustrate how patterns of teacher questioning influence student talk and learning across these two lessons through close discourse analysis of representative classroom talk excerpts. I show how this teacher’s questions are varied in form but consistently contingent on and responsive to students’ talk contributions, even though in one lesson students struggle to make sense of surface meaning in the focal text and in the other lesson, students easily relate to the focal text. This teacher’s willingness to listen, and wield questioning to follow and selectively support student ideas, purposes, and lines of reasoning, supports dialogic talk for thinking and learning. Student talk for thinking and learning is present, but looks different, in both lessons.