“Expanding teacher-student interaction through more effective classroom questions: from traditional teacher-fronted lessons to student-centred lessons in CLIL”

Abstract

This paper is drawn from a study on oral foreign language produced by students in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classes in Italy. The observation and analysis of the quality and quantity of students’ oral production have generated interesting data about different aspects related to the learning environment. In general, students’ oral production has proved to be exceedingly low, regardless of their level of competence in the foreign language or of the content processed. One of the main reasons for the lack of opportunities to practise and improve their speaking skills was that lessons observed were usually teacher-led rather than student-centred: teachers spoke for the most of the lesson time (even over 90%) and students did not appear to find a reason to intervene. In fact, this is what usually happens in all classrooms for the majority of the time. Furthermore, when students are required to interact, it is usually to give predetermined answers to some (often insignificant) display questions. This article, based on data collected during the study, refers to the use of questions by the teachers and tries to explore ways in which questioning can be used not only as a means to promoting learning in CLIL contexts but also as a means to enhancing students’ participation and, as a result, their oral production.