An Analysis of English Major Students’ Interrogative Constructions
Abstract
Questioning is known to have been used to probe the validity of an assumption, analyse the logic of an argument, and explore the unknown. Instead of lecturing what is true or false, philosophers utilized questioning for students’ understanding of a subject and then leading them to discover logical conclusions. Although role and types of questions utilized by teachers have been investigated in various learning environments, not the same attention has been given to students’ questions. This study aims to explore English major students’ question formation in the target language and analyse their interrogative constructions in terms of correct question forms and identify the specific difficulties they face while forming questions. In line with this purpose, 30 students were provided with a set of pictures and asked to write down as many questions as they could about these pictures within the time given. The study was conducted with students in the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, and the participants were 14 first-year and 16 second-year students. The study also utilised an open-ended questionnaire regarding the difficulties students had while conducting the activity and forming interrogative sentences in English. Students’ productions and the data collected from the open-ended questions were subjected to content analysis. It was found that the students constructed mostly Wh-questions and demonstrated errors in word order and verb form and that they had difficulties in forming interrogative constructions. Results are believed to help educators have a picture of challenges students face in this process.
Keywords
Interrogative Constructions,Questioning,EFL,Pictures,Question types
References
- Addaibani, A.A. (2017). Acquisition of Wh-questions in English by Saudi English majors in Najran University. British Journal of English Linguistics, 5(4), 17-28
- Anderson, C. (2010). Presenting and evaluating qualitative research. American journal of pharmaceutical education, 74(8), 141.
- Antoniou, M., Best, C. T., Tyler, M. D., & Kroos, C. (2011). Inter-language interference in VOT production by L2-dominant bilinguals: Asymmetries in phonetic code-switching. Journal of Phonetics, 39(4), 558-570.
- Arslan, M. (2006). The role of questioning in the classroom. Hasan Âli Yücel Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi, 3(2), 81-103
- Asgharheidari, F., & Tahriri, A. (2015). A Survey of EFL teachers’ attitudes towards critical thinking instruction. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 6(2), 388-396. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.0602.20
- Aydın, İ., & Şeker, E. (2013). A comparative study on English and Turkish syntactic structures within the terms of the Minimalist Program. International Journal of Linguistics, 5(1), 231-247. doi:10.5296/ijl.v5i1.3308
- Baleghizadeh, S. (2010). Focus on form in an EFL communicative classroom. Novitas-Royal, 4(1), 119-128
- Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics,1, 1-47
- Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1981). A theoretical framework for communicative competence. In Palmer, A., Groot, P., & Trosper, G. (Eds.), The construct validation of test of communicative competence, 31-36
- Caramazza, A., Yeni-Komshian, G. H., Zurif, E. B., & Carbone, E. (1973). The acquisition of a new phonological contrast: The case of stop consonants in French–English bilinguals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 54, 421–428