An Empirical Study on New Teacher-student Relationship and Questioning Strategies in ESL Classroom

Teacher-student relationship and questioning strategies are extremely crucial elements in English teaching and learning. Questioning strategies can influence learners' emotional changes in classroom and the relationship between teachers & students. The affective factors play a very important role in language teaching & learning. Questioning strategy is a fine effective strategy in teacher-student interaction, and it benefits the construction of new teacher-student relationship. Based on the questionnaires concerning current survey of "teacher-student relationship" and "questioning strategies in English classroom", we get the conclusion that the current teacher-student relationship and the questioning situation are not optimistic in teaching English as a second language (ESL). Most of students desire the new, harmonious, democratic teacher-student relationship, and want to show a nice performance in English class, and hope to be questioned in a proper and respectful way. Meanwhile, the paper, based on the affective factors and construction of new teacher-student relationship, puts forward some questioning strategies for construction of new teacher-student relationship.


Introduction
Questioning, currently, is one of the most effective teaching strategies in classroom environment.The strategies have been used so extensively that they can nearly satisfy foreign English learners of all ages and stages in any English learning setting.Thus they become a necessary part of the English teaching and learning activities, one of the most effective ways to interaction between teachers and learners, and one of the methods available of constructing new teacher-student relationship.Questioning strategies were carried out in the language-learning context effectively.Furthermore, they benefit from the improvement of teacher-student relationship if questioning strategies were used reasonably in teaching-learning process.Researchers who study the questioning strategies often focus too much on the skills or process and neglect the emotional factors, and as a result, their studies on questioning strategies become apparent, and virtually could not be put into effect.(Zou Yubin, 2004) Writer guesses questioning Strategies will influence learners' affection, and affective factors will affect teacher-student relationship.
Nowadays, as one of the effective English teaching strategies, we should always give more attention to the fact that questioning strategies are based on the interpersonal activities in a real interactive background, and it includes various individuals with their own single personalities that teachers encounter in the classroom.In a language course, success depends less on materials, techniques and linguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom.(Stevick, 1980) Stern (1983) commented, "The affective component contributes at least as much and often more to language learning than the cognitive skills..." The crucial thing is the safety and encouragement students feel in the classroom, suggested by Canfield and Wells (1994).Furthermore, if the students recognize that they are respected and valued, and are willing to accept affection and support, their potential will be unfolded all by themselves without doubt.Meanwhile, the teacher-student relationship can become better and better.

The Roles of Teachers and Learners
A great mind Rogers (1969) thinks that the teacher plays a role of facilitator in the teaching-learning process.Teacher should, he argues, help the English learners to learn and grow by a progressive reduction in the psychological distance between teacher and student, by an attempt to take more account of the learner's own agenda, even to be guided by it, by decentralizing control and being more democratic in the English teaching-learning context, and by nurturing meaningful communication, curiosity, insight, relationship in the class.The relationship between teacher and student exists for years, and the teacher is like second parent to a student.(Gow, L. and Kember, D., 1993) The relationship and communication between teacher and student are the most important thing for students and their success, as well as for teachers (Kyriacou. C. and Cheng, H. 1993).First of all, students should respect the teachers and, they should pay attention to the classes; the teachers should help the students solve their problems, and educate them in the best way; students shouldn't have negative mood, and the teachers as well; the students should talk to teachers, and have one friendly relationship with teachers.(Oxford. R., 1990) Therefore, in classroom, teachers and students are the most vital factors; they meet almost every day and the relationship between them is essential among all the relationships in the course of teaching.Teachers and students should cooperate pleasantly to create a harmonious atmosphere, which is the key to new relationship between teachers and students.Just as Pine and Boy (1997, 3) said: "Pupils feel the personal emotional construction of the teacher long before they feel the impact of the intellectual content offered by that teacher."Canfield and Wells (1994) suggest that the most important thing a teacher can do to help students emotionally and intellectually is to create an environment of mutual support and care.The crucial thing is the safety and encouragement students feel in the classroom.Furthermore, they must recognize that they are valued and will accept affection and support.

Questioning Strategies
In brief, a close teacher-student relationship plays a very important part in English acquisition.And it requires teachers to take all the affective factors involved in the teacher-student relationship into consideration automatically, to analyze and optimize these factors so as to motivate students and make our teaching-learning activities more effective.Therefore, one major task for teachers is to change their attitudes and teaching ideas, namely, to combine the affective sides of learning into teaching-learning activities.In addition, teachers should pay more attention to the emotional needs and expression of ESL learners.So it is necessary for teachers to treat their students with a sincere, considerate and understanding manner, to exchange their ideas equally with students as a facilitator rather than a lecturer or a leader.

Study Purpose
The study mainly explores the influence of classroom questioning strategies on the relationship between teachers and students.

Survey Subjects
A total of 73 students have taken part in the surveys.They have been taken from 3 classes of grade 2011, and the 3 classes have been selected form 3 schools of Shandong Youth University of Political Science, Shandong Province, China.They are from School of Foreign Languages, School of Law and School of Business.They are randomly selected from the enrollment lists, so as to provide each member an equal opportunity to be included in the sample (Dane, 1990).Among the 73 subjects, there are 56 females and 17 males.Their ages range from 19 to 21.

Study Instruments
The instrument of research is questionnaire surveys including two parts (Appendix): Part A (Questionnaire on Classroom Questioning Strategies) and Part B (Questionnaire on Teacher-student relationship).The questionnaire surveys request the survey subjects to write down their personal details (that is, gender, age etc.).Considering the sensitivity of the questions related to the teacher-student relationship, students need not write their names on the questionnaire so as to enhance the reliability of the research.

Study Procedure
The subjects were asked to complete the two questionnaires.In order to maximize uniformity and co-operation, the teacher explained the particulars concerning why the test was being given, and read a specific set of directions.The subjects have been informed that the tests were related to teacher's questioning strategies and teacher-student relationship.Since the results may provide new insights and guidelines to improve classroom setting, teacher-student relationship, and to lessen learning anxiety in the future, the subjects have been urged to answer all the questions carefully and honestly.The questionnaires have been completed anonymously after class, and the successful rate of the surveys is 100%.

Questionnaires Design
The study has two questionnaires, that is, Questionnaire on Classroom Questioning Strategies (Part A) and Questionnaire on Teacher-student relationship (Part B).
Part A includes 20 questionnaire items related to activities characterized by teacher-to-student interaction in the learning context.It is designed to explore the students' emotional response to teachers' questioning skills.Part B consists of 15 questions, which almost cover different aspects of teacher-student relationship.It is designed to discuss the teacher-student relationship based in class.

Result of Data Analysis and Discussion
By the questionnaire surveys, I have discovered the students wish their teachers to change their questioning strategies so that they can relax in the process of responding.Scientific questioning strategies benefit the reduction of classroom anxiety and the construction of new, harmonious and democratic teacher-student relationship.
The statistics on questioning skills suggests only 2.6% of subjects like their teacher to correct their language errors timely, while 87.3% prefer to be given hints and a necessary waiting time.63.2% desire to come by positive feedback of their answers from teacher, even the wrong answers; and 78.4% respond disgustingly to asking a fixed group of students to answer questions; 76.3% hope the teacher could get different-level students involved in the questioning activities.From the above, we can see most of students want to have a better classroom questioning environment.And the better affective environment make for better question asking.
The result of statistics on whether they care teachers' questioning style told us that 73.8% of them choose "yes", and only 5.2% choose "a little"; while more than 89% students think their teachers don't understand them; close to 96% like their teacher to give them more time to think about the questions.That reflects, to some degree, the current English teaching situation, namely, teachers still are the center and director in the classroom teaching under the condition of learner-centered teaching model introduced into the Chinese ESL classroom.Teacher-centered teaching model makes it more difficult for the teachers to understand and communicate with their students affectively.This will cause English learners to feel anxious, unsafe and unwilling to take part in classroom interaction, and the English class will be still dumb and meaningless, and the questioning strategies will not work in the classroom teaching environment.
Through the survey on the current situation of teacher-student relationship, we can see that 84.5% of the subjects can't construct good relationship with their teachers, 46.2% hold indifferent attitude to their teachers, and over 89.7% hope their teachers to use polite class expressions, to have kind look, and to know their English learning and their individual characters etc.It is thus clear that the situation of teacher-student relationship is not optimistic, and that students desire the understanding and communication between teachers and students.On the other hand, 85.1% think they would like to have a close relationship with their English teachers, and 64.7% believe that the close relationship would enhance their performance in questioning activities greatly.This strongly reflects their current attitude towards the teacher-student relationship and their affective needs in language learning.The survey on "whether teacher-student relationship and democratic teaching atmosphere have positive influence on answering questions" shows that 79.2% have supported "great influence", only 2.3% have chosen "don't know", others have gotten "no".While, for the question "what kind of teacher-student relationship they like," 93.7% have selected "understanding and respect, trust, and democracy"; 87.1% have thought teachers should be "understanding, sincere, and considerate", only 14.9% have seen "being learned and experienced" as their answers.This obviously shows that students need to be respected, understood and valued more, and most of the students in English classroom like the free and comfortable teaching environment.
Actually, the English teachers is the domination of construction of good teacher-student relationship and democratic teaching atmosphere, and their questioning strategies and the views of teacher-student relationship affect it greatly.What's more, harmonious Teacher-student relationship will make students have relaxing feeling, ease their classroom anxiety, and like to communicate with teachers in classroom.

Enlightenment to English Teaching
The above results show that One of the effective ways to improve the teaching efficacy is to take care of the students' psychological state, and to cultivate classroom atmosphere by improving questioning strategies that is beneficial for creating better classroom atmosphere, and constructing better teacher-student relationship.Therefore, according to Young(1991), Our task as foreign and second language teachers is to create an atmosphere in our classes for effective language learning and an attitude in our learners that reflects genuine interest and motivation to learn the language.As English teachers we should make efforts in the following directions.

English Teachers' Role
The improvement of teaching and learning requires that teachers change their focus on the construction of new teacher-student relationship and questioning strategies, and, in fact, questioning strategy is a very effective way.But making teachers shift their focus is not easy under traditional teaching thoughts.How to form a harmonious relationship between teachers and students is a significant subject.In classroom, teachers and students are the most vital factors, they meet almost every day, and thus relationship between teachers and students is essential among all the relations in the course of teaching.Teachers and students should work together pleasantly to create light atmosphere, which is the key to the good relationship between teachers and students.Good relationship between teachers and students in the need of the satisfaction with teaching and learning should be well valued.

Making an Advance Organizer on Affection
Bernard Dufue (1994) warns, "the teacher who doesn't take affective life of the group into account may unconsciously contribute to the development of the affective factors that inhabit learning".So, just as teachers make the effort to pass on to English learners linguistic knowledge, which is useful and powerful, we should also be concerned to provide a model that leads increasing their affective competence.This means the teacher should bring about improvement by developing students' aspects.Teachers need to cultivate themselves as a first step towards more effective teaching.A teacher, for example, who lacks self-esteem will hardly be able to contribute to raising the self-esteem of the learners.In the same way, if he lacks motivation in himself, hardly can he motivate his students.Indeed, as teachers, they need to be concerned with learners' emotion.Affection may be the key that opens or closes the door to English learning.Just as Pine and Boy (1997) said "pupils feel the personal emotional structure of the teacher long before they feel the impact of the intellectual content offered by that teacher".Furthermore, teachers are the focus of learners' attention and, they inevitably provide positive models to be followed or negative ones to be rejected.Cognitively, we set up good models when we provide examples of appropriate use of the language.Although there are a number of factors that contribute to successful outcomes for a language-learning group, according to Brown, N. W. (1994), none is more important than the group leader.In educational contexts the leaders are usually the teachers, and the way they carry out his role has a significant influence on the classroom atmosphere.Meanwhile, a harmonious relationship between teacher and student performs a very vital function in English teaching and learning activities.And these activities have been based on the hypothesis that whether the relationship is in harmony or not.In fact, nothing will be achieved virtually if there is no contact, communication or interaction between teachers and students.The relationship between the two sides would have led directly to the development of some degree of the enthusiasm of teaching and learning.
The teachers should get very well along with the students, after doing so, both sides will be vigorous in the process of ESL acquisition, and various activities will go smoothly, otherwise the two sides will feel frustrated and finally lose interest in this joint adventure.Additionally, the harmonious and democratic relationship between teachers and students will really satisfy the emotional needs of students as well as teachers, and it will contribute a lot to greater empathy of the people involved and a win-win situation will be created.

Making the Role Transformation
One of the most important concerns in classroom, for teachers, is to change their roles from center of the classroom teaching to director and facilitator, namely, students is the center in class.Factually, as a director and facilitator in classroom, teachers play an important role in the following aspects: feeling, attitudes, thoughts, movements, etc., have a great influence on the learning atmosphere.If teachers devote a little more time to reflecting the teaching beliefs, they will hold and then do their best to shift them, they will find so many things will be changed in a better direction, including the students' positive affection, the teacher-student relationship, students' performance in classroom, and so forth.
As a director and facilitator, it requires teachers to draw more attention to communication with the students psychologically.Teachers should be present emotionally in their mind.Thus a harmonious teacher-student relationship will be nurtured in advance through affective influence.This harmonious relationship functions as an affective advance organizer that will benefit the teaching-learning process.
Whether this affective advance organizer could be achieved requires teachers to change their roles by altering their teaching beliefs and attitudes towards students, investing more time and energy in this emotional program.Obviously, devoting time and energy to developing questioning strategies is a better way to construct the new teacher-student relationship in English learning contexts.

The Design of Questioning Strategies for the Construction of New Teacher-student Relationship
Questioning is regarded as "the core of the effective teaching" (Wilen, W., 1991).The design of questioning strategies should be based on cultivation of affective factors and cognitive theories.Factually, minds without affection are not really minds at all.And if teachers want to accomplish anything in this English teaching-learning process, they should combine affection with cognition.Cognition refers to the knowledge acquisition by psychological activities (e.g., the form of concept, perception, judgment or imagination).Traditionally, cognition and emotion will be corresponding.Cognitive function refers to the ability and process of thought, including understanding ability, logical thinking ability, creativity, problem solving skills and intuition.Teachers always have realized that the teaching process has more and more combination with various factors (for example, psychology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, education and neuroscience etc.) Thus more attention should be paid to the various factors, emotional as well as cognitive, which are intertwined and interrelated.And what teachers should do is to take all these factors into account and analyze them from different viewpoints so as to make them used fully and effectively.

Designing Effective Questions
In the process of English teaching, as everyone knows, whether teachers' classroom questioning strategies are successful relies on the attraction and inspiration of questions.The key is English learners because they will tend to answer what they think is worth answering.Unless teachers pay more attention to grasping what English learners regard as important and meaningful, have a sound understanding of what will meet their emotional needs, they will not make their students motivated to answer questions in class.
Therefore, in order to improve the student's classroom performance, teachers should give much attention to the design of questions.As you know, a well-designed question will not only energize the students to be involved in the teaching and learning activities to accomplish a given teaching goal, it will also raise our teaching efficiency.And how to design the effective questions for the students?First of all, it requires the teachers to dig into the teaching materials and make good use of them, and then, the teachers should cultivate the students positive emotion, new learning strategies, better psychology, etc. in order to take them variations in their personalities, learning styles, English level, to make them have more self-confidence in ESL, and to get them find out what they really need and want exactly.What's more, humanism is very important, because teachers must face their students' answers to questions in classroom.And any non-humanistic manners and questions from teachers should be avoided.Only do so, teachers can really make the English learning process smoothly developing.In addition, a well-designed question should be instructive, reflective and well planned.As a teacher, they should predict the possible answers from students, and have a pretty good idea of the possible answers.
Furthermore, some teachers argue, in the area beyond the learners' competence, the teachers provide them with assistance so that they may become progressively more autonomous and in control.But this kind of question design beyond their English level will make students feel anxious according to our teaching experience.So the teachers ought to bear in mind a principle that questions design must be matched to the learners' English level, and that teachers must, at any time, ask themselves whether the questions are proper for the class, whether the students understand exactly, whether questions are motivating, reflective, interesting, inspiring, and whether more attention is given to the students at different English level, and so forth.

Designing Humanistic Classroom Languages
Whether teachers' classroom languages are appropriate would influence students' classroom activities.To make classroom communication go smoothly, teachers must give much attention to students' listening and speaking abilities while they use classroom languages.Since the language, as a tool of communication, when used well, can bridge the psychological gap and create harmonious atmosphere that will make students become better participants.With humanistic activities in the process of teaching, everyone has the chance not only to speak, but also to have himself listened to.When positive mood is created in the English learning setting, and when the students all participate at once, it generates teaching and learning background, which serves to raise everyone's energy and enjoyment levels.As teachers ask students questions, polite languages should be used more, especially, in modern setting of teacher-student relationship.In other words, the elder tone, which maintains distance between teachers and the class, is not proper, and teachers should use equal tone to communicate with students.So teachers and students in the relations of equality will have equal and effective communication, and students will sense they have enough faces, have no more anxiety while answering questions.Conversely, as a teacher, he should reflect these questions mentioned consciously, and pay more attention to the way he speaks, which will lead to successful communication necessarily.

Cultivating Students' Participation
Recently, English teaching methods have been taken into special consideration the necessity of creating learning situations in which inhibition and ego barriers are lowed so that free communication can take place.After doing so, teachers have to develop a climate of acceptance in the classroom and a close relationship with English learners.The condition of a close relationship can improve the students' classroom participation.In order to encourage all the English learners to be involved in various classroom activities, a secure, supportive and free language environment should be nurtured first, and it largely depends on teachers' attitudes to students.
As a teacher trying to improve the students' classroom participation, he must treat every student equally.Yet for most of our students, this is not sufficiently met.Even though the teacher understands the importance of giving the same opportunity to every student, he still can not help favoring the `good' ones and giving them more chances than others.But it doesn't follow that teacher treats his students partially.Maybe the best solution to crack this hard nut is to call the students to answer question by their numbers in turn, suggested Shi Liangfang and Cui yunchun (1999).We must avoid the pitfalls that the equality means giving average opportunity to every student absolutely.And equality refers to all the learners in various classroom teaching activities are involved so as to make sure them have the time, opportunity, interest and motivation to think the questions over independently.In addition, how to treat the active volunteers is also a problem that must be thought over, because they frequently have more opportunities to perform in class."More than one study carried out recently show that calling for the volunteers to answer the questions would do great harm to the performance of the bulk of the students.One possible explanation is that the active volunteers seize too many chances and threaten the principle of equality." (Zou Yubin, 2004) Much advice about questioning impartiality is to prompt co-operation by enhancing classroom interaction, using activities such as pair-work, small group work, role-play etc.

Arranging Reasonable Waiting Time for Answering
A research carried out by Nunan (1992) showed that the time given to the students in America was only three seconds or less.Rowe (1974), another educator in America, stated in his research that he observed the waiting time given by American colleagues was no more than two seconds.Is the time span reasonable?Generally, English learners need enough time to think about the answers to the questions.Since serious thinking requires time and effort, students should be given a proper span of time to think about the questions given in the classroom before answering.So teachers should spare a little time to reflect on questioning strategies, then may actually find that the performance of the students enhanced a lot.As Rowe (1974) has pointed out, we have observed more involvement and participation in the class if we are patient enough to our students by extending the waiting time to five seconds or longer.

Carrying out Positive Feedback and Less Error Correction Strategies
The feedback about students' answers to questions, in the process of teaching, is necessary, but the ways to feedback will have large influence on English learners, namely, feedback may be either positive or negative."Positive feedback can make students active, comfortable, relaxed, confident, attentive, interested and enjoying the exchange in the language-learning context.It has the power to make the dead materials come to life and lead-headed students produce golden achievements.Whereas the negative ones can make them bored, passive, indifferent, depressed, anxious and aggressive and lose interest in language learning.It will frustrate our students, thus will do great harm to their language acquisition."(Zou Yubin, 2004) Questioning strategies are able to motivate learners' interest.Therefore, as a teacher, he should react to students positively and affectively, even if their answers are not correct.However, in the practical teaching process, teachers often use the negative more than the positive.The findings of a study in 1982 with one hundred children by Canfield (1994) showed that on average children receive 460 negative or critical comments a day and merely 75 positive ones.Therefore, English teachers, in my opinion, should give more attention to affective factors when giving feedback to students' answers to questions.
Additionally, error correction should be given more concern as well, because error in English learning is inevitable.Factually, language level is to be improved with language errors, regardless of native or second language, children or adult.However, some teachers hold the opinion that the language learning should be accuracy-orientated and, in the teaching practice, they like to correct students' every language mistakes, even a small mistake that can't affect the whole understanding, because they think this will train students' standard English.I argue that excessive error correction would discourage students' learning initiative and interest, would do great harm to their affective factors.Therefore, teachers should take affective factors into consideration when correcting students' errors, and encourage them to perform themselves positively in class regardless of the consequences.On the other hand, teachers had better reduce error correction, and ignore some minor errors.It is more useful for English learners to take moderate and intelligent risks, such as guessing the meanings based on background knowledge and speaking up despite the possibility of making occasional mistakes, rather than taking no risks at all or taking extremely, uninformed risks (Oxford, 1990;Brown, H. D., 1994).Of course, it is generally accepted that teachers cope with errors in critical issues in the right way, and it can be helpful.And for the English learners, they, ideally, should develop the ability to monitor their own performance in class and to correct themselves.

Conclusion
It is necessary for English teaching and learning to interact between teachers and students.Questioning is a fine effective strategy in the interaction, and it benefits the construction of new teacher-student relationship, because it has positive influence on English learners' affection.Through the current surveys on teacher-student relationship and questioning strategies, it shows that most of the students desire the new, harmonious, democratic teacher-student relationship, and want to give a nice performance in class, and hope to be questioned in a proper and respectful way; meanwhile we come to the conclusion that the current teacher-student relationship and questioning situation are not optimistic in teaching English as a second language (ESL).To build the harmonious atmosphere in class, teachers have to make their effort to establish new teacher-student relationship and positive questioning strategies, and to pay more attention to students' affective factors, such as anxiety, inhibition, extroversion-introversion, motivation, learner styles, and classroom transactions.English teaching and learning is an exceedingly complex project, and whether questioning strategies are successful or not will give great effect on new teacher-student relationship.