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In:Applying Corpora in Teaching and Learning Romance Languages
Edited by Henry Tyne and Stefania Spina
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 122] 2025
► pp. 258–293

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Chapter 11
Teachers’ questioning strategies and their implications for learner responses

A corpus-based study of spoken interaction in the French L2 classroom

 | University of Malta
Published online: 20 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.122.11bez
Abstract
This study investigates questioning strategies employed by teachers of French as a foreign language and their effect on the quality of learners’ verbal participation. Spoken interaction methods such as reference to turn-taking schemes and analysis of utterance structure help describe participants’ exchanges in a corpus of French lessons delivered in Maltese secondary schools. A revised version of the taxonomy of teachers’ questioning strategies proposed by Wu (1993) is used to measure the extent to which different types of questions stimulate learners’ verbal responses and to describe response features. In this context, teacher talk is predominant, teachers resort massively to comprehension check and metalanguage display questions, and learner turns are solicited and often pre-defined to be restricted.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The foreign language(s) teaching scenario in the Maltese Islands
    • 2.1Tentative characterisation of a Maltese educational culture
  • 3.Teacher questioning
    • 3.1Typology of questions and answers
    • 3.2Wu’s taxonomy of questioning strategies
      • 3.2.1Previous studies based on Wu’s taxonomy
      • 3.2.2Other studies on teacher questioning
  • 4.Methods of research
    • 4.1The corpus
    • 4.2Delimiting the sample of questions retained for the analysis
    • 4.3Usefulness of the digital corpus analysis
  • 5.Observed results
    • 5.1Length and complexity of learners’ responses to the different questioning strategies
    • 5.2Language use in learners’ answers to the different questioning strategies
  • 6.Interpretation of results
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
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