Implications of the study

This study’s findings have several important implications for practitioners, academics and policy makers in Thailand. Implications regarding Thai teachers’ questioning could contribute to teacher education, professional development, and indirectly to children in classes.

 Implications of the proposed model of Thai teachers’ questioning practice for

stakeholders in Thai education

The proposed model for understanding may enable stakeholders in Thai education (such as practitioners, academics and policy makers) to gain a better understanding of the complexity of teachers’ questioning in practice. The three main elements of the questioning practice were: the derived purposes, the question types, and the strategies used in the interaction with the children in the context of teaching. Three layers of factors influenced the use of questioning, which were: the teacher’s cognition on formative assessment and enquiry-based learning, the social and cultural factors relating the classroom rules on answering in unison and Thai culture of collectivism, and the contextual factors relating to the large classes of children, cognitive abilities of 4-5 year children and the Thai early childhood curriculum. By gaining an understanding of the current situation of questioning, stakeholders may use this information to provide some action for the benefit of children’s learning.

Regarding practitioners, it is clear that the ones who gain the most benefit from this study are teachers themselves. This is because, with a range of questioning purposes and strategies

derived from this exploratory research, teachers can enhance their skills in questioning. Although the majority of them know how to ask questions in a classroom, the fragmentation of purposes in asking questions and strategies in scaffolding learning is evidence that there is room for them to improve their skills. Thus, a more comprehensive understanding in questioning, from the results of this study, may improve their questioning performance.

In terms of policy makers, it is clear that several factors influencing teachers’ questioning practices found in this research are beyond the control of individual teachers. For example, training is needed to enhance teachers’ skills in questioning as they mostly gain this skill from experience rather than official training. As a consequence, policy makers play an important role in the improvement of Thai teachers’ questioning skills as a whole. Therefore, the findings of this study may result in policy makers gaining a better understanding in Thai teachers’ questioning, which may, in turn, lead to the introduction of a clear policy to promote classroom questioning for Thai teachers.

Some of the recommendations for policy makers are shown here. Asking better questions and developing questioning strategies may be some of the tools that can lead to this achievement in the quality of Thai education as mentioned in the Introduction (Section 1.2.2). Therefore, the formal training of teachers for questioning in classrooms may be the solution. Moreover, based on the literature review, this study found that guidance on pedagogy in early primary teaching was missing in government documents. The guidance on teachers’ questions for promoting children’s learning should be featured in the curriculum guidance, which is to be published by the government. An example of good teachers’ questioning should be revealed as a model to be developed.

 Pedagogical implications for early primary teachers and teacher educators This study has found that teachers’ understanding of pedagogical practice on questioning appears fragmented according to the questioning purposes, varied types, and strategies used by each teacher. Enhancing teachers’ understanding on questioning purpose, types, and strategies may extend a repository of questioning. Alternative and more effective ways of using the questions and strategies could be adopted in teaching contexts. The findings about the categories of eight questioning strategies, as shown in Table 4.7, and the existing literature, present comprehensive strategies that could be used as follow-up questions in order to extend children’s responses and sustain classroom dialogues (Dillon, 1988; Wood, 1991; Nassaji and Wells, 2000; Smith and Higgins, 2006). This can be done by the pre-service and in-service teacher trainers. A comprehensive course on teachers’ questioning should be included in the

curriculum of teacher education in Thailand, due to the fact that questioning is an important skill for every teacher (Harrop and Swinson, 2003).

This study has found that Thai teachers ask varied types of questions in terms of teachers’ purposes in asking questions, but tend to elicit very short answers of two words on average. The question types asked and their impact on children’s learning needs to be focused on. This can be communicated to the teachers and followed up by self-reflections as part of attending their in-service training. The findings regarding the actual questions, in terms of particular purposes of questions as discussed in Section 4.3, may be used as examples. In addition, there is a need for teachers to plan questions asked before teaching. For educational purposes of promoting children learning and their thinking skills, teachers may need to learn to ask more purposeful questions. Planning what questions are to be asked in a lesson may be a next step forward (Wragg and Brown, 2001; Myhill, 2006). Wragg and Brown (2001, p. 21) suggested that, in order to ask questions for children to think, we ought to plan what questions need to be asked.

It was found that two teachers were influenced by the school principal, as presented in Section 4.7.3, and other teachers reported no experience on reflective practice on asking questions. Reflective practice on the use of questions may result in a greater understanding for teachers in their questioning practice. Individual early primary teachers should be provided with working hours per school term for an opportunity to perform reflective practice for professional development. In order to improve the questioning, reflective practices, such as mentoring, coaching and writing would be very useful. Walsh (2006), suggested that watching videos would raise the teachers’ language awareness, which would be applicable to their teacher questioning practice. Similar to the Self Evaluation of Teacher Talk (SETT) framework in language teacher education, three aspects of teachers’ questioning, for example, the purposes, types of questions and questioning strategies, may be used as focus points for reflection. With an aim of improving children’s learning, teachers may improve their practices by testing out new ideas. Raising an awareness of why the questions are asked would help to promote questioning practices.

Apart from pedagogical knowledge as discussed previously, a teacher’s own subject knowledge may influence the quality of his or her questions. In this current study most teachers in early primary education taught all subjects in the curriculum, so generally they were not specialised in science. Questions tends to aim for formative assessment and scaffolding, rather than the co- construction of understandings (as discussed in Section 5.5). One of the reasons may be a lack of knowledge in science so “those who lacked content knowledge tended to emphasise the

recall of facts and propagate their own misunderstandings” (Newton and Newton, 2001, p. 370). In Newton and Newton's study (2000) on subject content knowledge in Key Stage 2 primary science lessons in England, teachers with scientific backgrounds tended to ask more questions in order to promote casual understanding than did non-science teachers.

One way of achieving this might be by providing an organising structure for the teachers’ science knowledge, by developing skills of information management, and by contextualising pedagogical knowledge” (Newton and Newton, 2001, p. 375, original emphasis).

The subject content knowledge raises teachers’ confidence in teaching science (Harlen and Holroyd, 1997).