Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
The Ministry of Education of Chinese government promulgated the Norm ofEnglish Curriculum for Senior High Schools (For Trial Implementation, 2017). Witha view to keeping up with the requirement, one of the main principles is to stress onthe training of students comprehensive language skills, in the meantime, pay moreattention to improve the students’ ability to acquire and deal with information inEnglish, to analyze and solve problems, and to think and express in English. TheRequirement points out that “the quality of teachers is the key to the success of Seniorhigh English teaching reform and to the long-term development of the discipline”. InChina, there are quite few interactions among students in English classrooms, whileteacher-student interaction occurs very often.Questions have become an indispensable part of classroom interaction.According to classroom observation, questioning is one of the most often usedteaching techniques (Kim & Kellough, 1987) and it is viewed as the second mostdominant instructional strategy after lecture (Freiberg & Driscoll, 1996). Especially inthe context of English as a second language classroom, teacher questions take ratherhigh percentage of teacher-student interaction (Thompson, 1997).In recent years, researchers have increasingly focused on the role of teacherquestions in language learning classroom. One of the most widely acclaimedclassification of teacher questions is referential questions and display questions.According to Long and Sato (1983), referential questions are questions to whichteachers do not know the answers (e.g., Why do you think the author chose thatpicture for the book cover?). Referential questions lay in contrast to display questions.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
According to previous literature, we can see that there exists several problems inresearches on referential questions.First of all, researches concerning referential questions in China in recent yearshardly make any further step but just summarize and repeat previous studies in thisaspect from abroad. Chinese experts need to conduct more empirical studies on thisissue besides theoretical researches.Second, many researchers have concluded that 79% of all teacher questions aredisplay questions (Long & Sato, 1983) while referential questions only take 14%(Lynch, 1991). However, from the perspective of second language acquisition,referential questions lead to longer and more complex language output than displayquestions. Referential questions are so crucial in students’ language acquisition thatteachers should have pay attention to referential questions to help language learners insecond language classroom.The last problem is that a certain number of studies show that language learnersdo not always easily answer referential questions independently. That is also to say,referential questions can be challenging for second language learners to answerwithout any help from others.
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Chapter Two literature review
2.1 Referential Questions
Teacher questions have been classified as display and referential questions. Theyboth relate to the nature of interaction between teachers and students (Tsui, 1995). Theteacher often asks display questions to which the ans，英语论文，英语论文题目
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