Questions in Educational Discourse

Since the data used in this study is lectures, we are speaking of a specific context and setting in which most of the dialogic interactive features are not present. However, as Mauranen (2009: 203) stated: “it is nevertheless important to bear in mind that using language is always also interactive”. One of the ways in which interactivity manifests itself during lectures is through questions, even when they do not always result in question – answer sequences.

Educational discourse has been explored for decades. To analyze classroom discourse, Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) formulated a model based on the basic teacher – student interaction: ask – answer – comment, which became opening move, answering move, follow-up move and is known as the ‘Birmingham Model’. McCarthy (1991) based his model of initiation – response – follow-up on the Birmingham Model and uses it to analyze classroom discourse, which he describes as more formal than, for example, conversation.

This type of speech is identified as typical “teacher talk” which, according to McCarthy, should be balanced with what he calls “real communication” (1991: 18).

Since lectures can be seen as the university classroom discourse, their educational environment is similar to classrooms. The Birmingham Model has been the basis for studies focusing on monologue structure (Coulthard and Montgomery, 1981) which includes lectures. Simpson (2004) explored formulaic expressions in academic speech and classified expressions based on their pragmatic purpose and she placed questions in the

“mostly interactive” category. Young’s (1994) study of macro structures in university lectures saw questions as lecturers’ means to establish contact with their audience. Her study identified different phases in a lecture, such as discourse structuring, conclusion, and evaluation phases. The use of questions, according to Young, identifies the interactional phase of lectures.

Several studies have focused on questions in either lectures or academic speech in general.

Fortanet’s (2004) study on interactional features in lectures used a broad definition of rhetorical and non-rhetorical questions which are similar to Thompson’s (1998) audience and content-oriented questions. Fortanet, however, does not divide these categories any further, which provides fairly superficial information on the use of questions in lectures.

This categorization has been used, nevertheless, in other recent studies, e.g. by Björkman (2010).

Morell’s (2004) investigation of lectures and interaction in them resulted in four different types of questions: referential (looking for unknown information), display (looking for verification of student knowledge), rhetorical (looking for no answer by the audience but usually answered by the lecturer), and indirect (looking for a non-verbal response from the audience, e.g. a raise of hands). In addition to these question categories, Morell’s study includes three different types of negotiating meanings: clarification requests (looking for a repetition of the previous utterance What did you say?), confirmation checks (looking for confirmation on what was said This Thursday?), and comprehension checks (looking for assurance of comprehension Did you understand?).

Morell’s (ibid.) categories for the most part appeared useful. However, what Morell called display questions were, in the present study, not seen as much a verification of student knowledge as they were seen as a clue to the lecturer: if students are not able to respond to the posed questions, the issue needs to be clarified further. In Morell’s display questions the idea seemed to be the display of student knowledge and, therefore, a perception of a knowledgeable student whose course grade may be influenced by this. Thompson’s (1998) study on general academic talk, not only lectures, used a similar, broader categorization of questions similar to Fortanet (2004), but she divided these broader categories of

content-oriented (rhetorical/no response by the audience expected) and audience-content-oriented (non-rhetorical/a response by the audience expected) questions into sub-categories. Content-oriented questions include questions which raise issues and introduce information while the audience-oriented questions are divided into check questions, evoke audience response questions, and seek agreement questions.

The most refined question categories were provided by Querol-Julian (2008: 103-108), who also used the broader audience-oriented and content-oriented categories. Audience-oriented questions are divided into eight subcategories: check (Can everybody hear me?), evoke audience response (Anyone see a problem with this?), corrective feedback (Okay, who’s gonna give me a definition of what’s alive?), invitation to formulate a question (Anything you want to ask me?), invitation to students’ intervention (Yeah? –here an apparent reaction to a raised hand or some other non-verbal clue), seek clarification (You mean the time frame? – when the teacher wants to clarify what has been asked), seek repetition (I’m sorry – when the student asks something and the lecturer does not hear or understand the question), seek agreement (Seems a bit difficult, no?). The content-oriented questions include four of them: introduce information (Why does the disease come back? Well, what happens is…), rhetorical question (Who am I, who are you?), example (We used to ask questions like did your mother work…), raise issue (How do we know that cell populations vary? Let’s go back to…).

The use of this many categories was considered for the present study. The informational value of all these categories was, nevertheless, not seen beneficial as far as the present approach is concerned. Teasing apart category after category may be useful in studies concentrating only on questions, but here a somewhat broader approach was seen sufficient.

As discussed above, Morell’s (2004) study, which compared linguistic aspects of lectures, places questions into four categories according to Athanasiadou’s (1991) classification:

referential to obtain unknown information, display to demonstrate what students know, rhetorical where no response is expected and indirect to which some type of action is expected from the students (who was here last time when we had this? those students who were present, may be expected to raise their hands). These functions are present in my data,

with an addition of questions as organizers or what Hyland (2004) refers to as “frame markers” to structure the lecture which are similar to what Mauranen (2009) calls

“boundaries”. Questions, in general, can be seen both as structural devices during a lecture and as interactional devices as their use increases involvement and mutually shared knowledge.

Based on Thompson’s (1998) taxonomy, Crawford Camiciottoli (2008) also used the division between audience-oriented and content-oriented questions. Crawford Camiciottoli (2008) also subdivided these categories further in a similar manner to Bamford’s (2005) study. The audience-oriented questions include: eliciting response; requesting confirmation/clarification; and soliciting agreement while the content-oriented question include focusing information and stimulating thought.

As research indicates, questions increase interaction among interlocutors and increase involvement even in a monologue (see Section 2.2). Camiciottoli’s (2008) study further indicates that questions in business lectures are used in a similar manner as questions in business studies text books. This demonstrates how lectures fall somewhere between written and spoken texts, as indicated in Section 2.1.

As an overview of the questions and how they manifest themselves in lectures, I first focused on the form and searched for interrogative forms in the data. Table 6.1 already introduced most of the question forms found in this study, but in addition to those (wh-questions, yes/no (wh-questions, and parallel questions), I have included a fourth category

“other” which includes those questions which avoided categorization altogether. Tag questions, as defined above, were missing from the present data completely. Tag questions in the present study do not include checks, such as okay or right.

As the questions were identified, they were further divided into categories based on their function. My functional analysis is based on a model combined from the models used in the previous studies mentioned above. I have used Thompson’s (1998) main categories, content-oriented and audience-oriented to classify the questions. Although these categories, just like any categories for spoken text, are not perfect, this classification provides a broad

definition which is a basis for further investigation. The audience-oriented questions often contain a personal pronoun and tend to expect some type of a response, either a verbal or non-verbal response, such as the raise of hands. The content-oriented ones usually do not contain a personal pronoun, are used as rhetorical questions, and are either not answered at all or are answered by the lecturer. I use the terms content-oriented questions and rhetorical questions interchangeably while Querol-Julian (2008) views rhetorical questions as a sub-category of content-oriented questions. Fortanet’s (2004) categories of rhetorical and non-rhetorical questions as well as Morell’s (2004) classification of lecture questions use a broader view on rhetorical questions, which include all those questions which do not expect a response. An approach closer to the latter view is adapted in the present study though content-oriented questions are also further categorized into more definite groups rather than using only the broad classification introduced by Morell and Fortanet.

Table 6.2 below provides an overview of the question categories and their detailed definitions with examples following.

Table 6.2 Question Categories Audience-oriented

Information seeking/checking posed by the lecturer (QAI) Information seeking/checking posed by a student (QAIS) Didactic elicitation (QAD)

Invitation (QAO)

Content-oriented

Focusing (QCF)

Organizing (QCO)

The questions in the data were first located manually and after that the corpus was tagged according to the question categories in order to ease the compilation of the quantitative data (see Chapter 3). The WordSmith Tools 4.0 program was used in this process, as explained in Chapter 3, both to count the occurrences and as a concordance to see the environment in which these question categories manifest themselves.