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B I L I N G U A L M I C R O T E A C H I N G :A N A N A L Y S IS OF QUESTIONINGS K I LLS

R ex Heyworth

Introduction

The task of teaching is a complex one andinvolves a large number of skills. In order toproduce an effective lesson, th e teacher has topu t together many of these skills. The techniqueof microteaching breaks down th e task ofteaching into a number of specific skills, eachof which th e teacher practises. On evaluation ofhis performances of these skills, the teacher isable to obtain a measure of his strengths an dweaknesses . Of all the teaching skills, those ofquestioning are probably the most important.The effective use of these skills produces active,thought ful pupils w ho participate to a greatextent in the learning process. Without them,th e lesson is reduced to a dull monologue, withpassive pupils who gain little in understandingan d less in inspiration.

Most microteaching courses include thepractice of questioning skills. In the past fewyears , research has been undertaken in a numberof countries to determine th e most effectiveway of doing this. Borg (1970)1 in the UnitedStates developed a course which was adaptedfo r use in Great Britain by Perrott et. al (1972-74) 2. The latter course is designed to help theteacher improve 12 questioning skills or habitswhich reduce teacher talk and bring aboutmore active pupil participation in discussions.This course was adapted for use in Hong Kongan d forms the basis of the study outlined in thisarticle.

In Hong Kong, there is a need fo r teachersto be able to teach in the medium of the Chineselanguage and also in the medium of the Englishlanguage. The present study takes the 12 skillsfrom th e British work an d gives pre-servicet eachers the opportunity of practising themin both languages. Th e study is an extension of

previous work by the author which involvedan investigation of the overall effects of micro-teaching on the technique of questioning in bothChinese an d English. In this, pre-course an dpost - course lessons in both languages wereanalysed using two measures of performance -th e number of questions asked, and the percen-tage of higher-order cognitive questions. Themicroteaching course produced significant im -provements in performance in both measuresf rom th e pre-course lessons to the post-courselessons in both Chinese and English. In addition,no significant differences were found betweenthe improvements obtained through teaching inone language as compared with teaching in theother language. The results of this earlier study arefully described in an earlier article.3 The presentstudy goes a step fur ther an d looks more closelyat the specific skills which were part of thisprogramme.

With this background in mind, the objec-tives of the present study are t w o - f o l d :

a) to investigate th e effects of a micro-teaching course on 12 specific skills practisedin both the medium of Chinese and the mediumof English.

b) to compare the questioning skillsof pre-service teachers in Hong Kong with thoseof pre-service teachers in other countries.The Questioning Skills

The questioning skills are the same asthose used in the International MicroteachingResearch Unit of the University of InternationalMicroteaching Research Unit of the Universityof Lancaster by Perrott et. al. They are describedelsewhere but are repeated here fo r convenieche.See Table 1. Although some of the skills listedappear simple an d obvious, teachers often failto use them, even when it is pointed out that

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C U H K Education Journal VoL 10 No. 1, 1982

they are not being used. Overseas workers4'3have shown that when such skills are practisedin microteaching, teachers not only transferthem to the normal classroom situation butalso continue to use them.Research Method

1) Experimental Design and SubjectsAs described in the previous ChineseUniversity Education Journal (pp. 47-49),pre-service Chemistry teachers involved ina microteaching programme taught 20-minute lessons before an d after th e pro-gramme. Each pre-service teacher taughttwo pre-course lessons one in Chinese

2)

and one in English t o di f fe rent groupsof school pupils. These lessons wererepeated in the post-course lessons. Thesubjects were pupils from local secondaryschools, chosen randomly, and thendivided into groups of six. The same pupilsw e r e used for the microteaching courseas well as for the pre-course an d post-course lessons.Measures of performance

The pre-ccurse and post-courselessons were recorded on videotape.Each lesson was scored for 15 measuresof teaching performance. Most of thesehad also been assessed in similar studiesin the United States and Sweden. The

Table 1: The questioning skills and relatedobjectives used in the microteaching programme

Session AObjective : To encourage pupils to respond

1. Pausing 3-5 seconds after asking a question b e f o r e calling on a pupil to answer2. Treating incorrect responses in an accepting manner3. Calling on non-volunteers as well as volunteers to answer a question

To improve pupils' initial responses4. Prompting pupils who are unable to respond5. Asking for further clarification of incomplete responses6. Refocusing the pupils' response

Session CObjective : To increase the level and amount of pupil participation

Skills:

Section BObjective:Skills:

Skills : 7.

8.

Asking questions that call for longer pupil responses:(a) asking questions that call for sets of related facts(b) discouraging one-word responses from pupilsAsking questions that require pupils to use higher -o rde r though processes

9. Redirecting the same or a modified question to other pupils

Session DObjective : To eliminate habits which disrupt the flow of discussionSkills: 10. Avoiding repeating one's own question

1 1 . Avodiing repeating pupils' answers12. Avoiding answering one's own questions

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Rex Heywo rth Bilingual Micro teaching: An Analysis of Questioning

measures a r e :(1) mean length of teacher's pause afterasking a question but beforecalling on a pupil;(2) the number of times th e teacherasks a prompting question;(3) the number of times th e teacherseeks furth er clarification;

(4) the number of times the teacherasks a refocusing question;(5) the numbe r of t imes the teacherredirects a question to anotherpupil ;

(6) the numb er of questions whichresulted in pupils giving longerresponses;(7) the mean num be r of words in pupils'responses;(8) the number of questions whichresulted in pupils giving on e-w or danswers;(9) the percentage of the teacher 'squestions requiring pupils to usehigher-order thought processes;

(10) th e number of times the teacheranswers his own questions;(11) the number of times the teacherrepeats his own questions;(12) th e number of times th e teacher

repeats pupils' answers;(13) th e tota l number of questionsasked;(14) the percenta ge of discussion timetaken up with th e teacher talk;(15) the percentage of discussion timefor pupil participation.The 15 measures analysed gave an

indication of the performance of thepre-service teachers on 10 of the 12specific questioning skills practised in thecourse (Table 1). No measure was in-cludes for "treating incorrect responses inan accepting manner" (skill 2) as thisoccurred naturally, probably because smallgroups of pupils were used rather thannormal classes of 40 or mo re, as well as thefact that the lessons were filmed. Similarfindings have occurred in overseas studies.The m easure of "the percentage ofnon-volunteers called on" to assess skill 3

wa s not included because it could not bereliably determined from th e videotapes.This same difficulty was expereincedin th e American studies6 but was overcomein the British study by placing a staffmember in the classroom to recordwhether a pupil called on had volunteeredor not.7 Due to the lack of teachers, thislatter procedure was not possible in theHong Kong study.

"The percentage of teacher talk","the total number of questions asked", an d"percentage of time fo r pupil participa-tion" were also included. These reflectoverall objectives of the course an d wereanalysed in depth in the author's previousstudy. However the results are includedagain in this study for the sake of com-pleteness and for comparisons to be madewith other countries.3) Rating Procedures

Each pre-course and post-courselesson was assessed by a trained researchassistant. Each tape was rated once foreach skill, with the whole 20 minutes ofeach lesson being assessed. This was feltpreferable to taking samples of lessons(for appropriate skills) beacuse of thenature of the lessons. These involvedChemistry topics and as demonstrationswere often included, 5-minute samplesmight not be representative of the wholelesson.

Hypotheses1. For lessons taught in either Chinese orEnglish, there were expected to b e :(a) significant increases form pre-course

lessons to post-course lessons in themean length of pause, the frequencyof prompting, clarification, refocus-ing and redirection, the number oflonger responses, the mean numberof words pe r pupil response, th enumber of questions, the percentageof higher-order questions, and thepercentage of time for pupil partici-pation.

(b) significant decreases from pre -courselessons to post-course lessons in the37

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CUHK Education Journal Vol. 10 N o. I , 1982

number of one-word responses, thefrequency of answering own ques-tions, repeating own questions andrepeating pupils' answers, and inthe percentage of teacher talk.2. No significant difference were expected

in mean improvements between p re -course lessons and post-course lessonson each questinging skill for lessons taughtin Chinese and those taught in English.Statistical significance was determined

using 't ' tests fo r differences between correlatedpairs of means at the 0.05 level or less. Becauseof the directional form of the hypotheses, one-tailed tests were used.Results1) Bilingual microteaching in Hong KongFor each of the 15 measur es, ananalysis was made of the mean differencesbetween the pre-course lessons and the

post-course lessons. A summary of theoutco me of the analysis is shown in Table2. For lessons taught in Chinese, 10of the 15 measures show significant im-provements between pre-course and post-course lessons. Th e frequency of refocus-ing, the number of one-word responses,the skills involving repetition of questionsand answers, and the answering of theteacher's own questions do no t showsignificant improvement. In fact thenumber of one-word responses actuallyincreases in the post-course lessons!For lessons taught in English asimiliar pattern emerges. Nine of the15 measures show significant improve-ments. Of those that are not significant,three have differences in the directionopposite to that hy pothesised. The numberof one-word responses, the number oftimes the teacher repeated his own ques-tions, and the number of times the teacherrepeated pupils' answers all increasefrom pre-course to post-course lessons!Analysis was also carried out tocompare the improvements on the 15measures for the lessons taught in Chinesewith those taught in English. None of the

measures showed any significant differenceexcept for the number of times the teacherrepeated his own questions (t = 2.14;d f = 5 ; p < 0 . 0 5 ) .

A further analysis wa s carried outto compare th e differences from pre-course to post-course lessons for theincreases in questions requiring one-wordanswers to the increases in questionsyielding longer responses for lessons inChinese and in English. Table 3 summarizesthe outco mes of the analysis.

Although the skill in asking questionsthat require longer responses shows im-provement , the ability to discouragequestions that give one-word answersdoes not (as the number actually increasesfrom pre-course to post-cours lessonsin both Chinese and in English). Theincrease in the number of longer responsesover th e number of one-word responsesis significant for lessons taught in Chinesebut not in English.2) Comparing the results of microteachingin H ong Kong with those in other coun-tries.

A comparison was made of theeffects of microteaching on the questioningskills of Hong Kong pre-service teacherswith those of pre-service teachers in theUnited Stated and Sweden.8 Table 4summarizes these findings. In order tomake a comparison on a first languagebasis, the Hong Kong results are onlyfor lessons taught in the medium of Chines.

In the Hong Kong study, 7 out of the12 teaching skills listed show significantimprovements between pre-course andpost-course lessons. The studies from bothother countries show significant improve-ments in only 5 of the skills. None of thestudies obtained significant differences forthe skill of refocusing. In only one case length of pause after question - didall three studies obtain significant differ-ences.

Discussion1) The effects of microteaching on the

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Rex Heyworth Bilingual Microteaching: An Analysis of Questioning

Table 2: Differences in measures of teaching performance related to questioning technique betweentaught in both Chinese an d English before an d after a course in microteaching.

Measures

A. Skills to encouragepupils to respond1. Mean length ofteacher's pauseafter questions

B. Skills to improve pupils'initial responses2. Number of timesteacher used

prompting3. Number of timesteacher soughtclarification4. Number of timesteacher usedrefocusing

C. Skills to increase th elevel and amount ofpupil participation5. Number of times teacher

used redirection6. Number of questionsyielding longer

responses7. Mean length of pupils'responses in words

8. Number of one-wordresponses9. Perce ntage ofquestions requiringhigher-order responses

D. Skills to eliminate habitswhich disrupt the flow ofdiscussion10 . Number of times teacher

answered his ownquestions

11. Number of times teacherrepeated his ownquestion

12. Number of times teacherrepeated pupils' answersE- Globalmeasures of perfor-mance

13. Number of questionsasked

14. Percentage of discus-sion time taken byteacher talk

15. Percentage of timefor pupil participation.

Lessons in Chinese

MeanBefore

0.20

0.00

1.00

0.00

1.33

0.331.824.836.15

2.67

0.50

6.33

10.0079.20

2.15

ScoresAfter

1.45

2.33

4.00

0.00

4.338.50

4.576.50

58.80

0.67

0.335.83

22.7060.15

11.30

td f = 5

4.66*"*

11.05***

3.50**

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C U H K Education Journal Vol. 10 No. 1,1982

Table 3: Mean increases from pre-course to post-course lessons in two specific questioning skills forlessons taught in Chinese and in English (taken from Table 2).

Medium ofinstruction

ChineseEnglish

Mean increaseNo. one -word

responses+ 1.67+4.83

s (pre-post)No. longerresponses

+8.17+9.00

Difference

+6.50+4.17

t(d f=5)

2.70*0.79

*p

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RexHeyworth Bilingual Micro teaching: An Analysis of Questioning

questioning teachniques of pre-serviceteachers in Hong KongBefore the course of microteaching,

the performance of Hong Kong pre-service Chemistry teachers in the use ofquestioning skills is poor. This is truefo r lessons taught in the medium ofChinese as well as in the medium ofEnglish. In the 20-minute pre-courselessons, an average of only 10 questionswere asked fo r lessons in Chinese an d6.5 for lessons conducted in English.O f these, about half were simple questionsrequiring one-word answers. Most of theremaining questions asked yielded noresponse from th e pupils, and teachersshowed almost no skill in probing in orderto elicit some response. There was almosta total absence of questions which requirepupils to think and to give longer sentence-type responses. This resulted in lessons inwhich the teacher lectured and the pupilsremained passive. The teachers talkedfor an average of 79% of each lesson,while pupils were involved in discussionfor only 2% of the time. To accountfo r these results, cultural influences mustbe taken into account. In the Chinesecontext, pupils have traditionally remainedpassive with the teacher being the learnedauthority who dispenses knowledge andwisdom. When th e present pre-serviceteachers were at school, this was the waythe teaching was done. Having had noother model of teaching, they naturallytend to repeat teaching methods withwhich they are familiar.However, by following a course of micro-teaching in which specific questioningskills are practised, the post -course lessonsshowed substantial improvements. Lessonstaught in both languages showed a muchhigher use of questioning skills. Theamount of teacher talk had decreased,there was more time spent in pupil partici -pation, and the important probing skillsof prompting an d clarification showedsignificant increases. A s shown in Table 3,teachers were able to increase the numberof questions which required longerresponses. However, they still tended to

ask too many questions which requiredonly one-word answers. This was particul-arly true fo r lessons in the medium ofEnglish, in which pupils were more reluct-ant to give longer answers in a foreignlanguage. This difficulty also occurredwhen higher-order cognitive questionswere asked. Although more than halfthe questions in the post-course lessonswere of this type and required the pupilsto think, they did not require long pupilresponses. The s tude n t - t e ache rs on theprogramme commented on the difficultyexperienced in trying to discourageone-word or brief responses. Furtherevidence of this difficulty is reflected inthe length of the teacher's pause afterasking a question. Fo r lessons in Chinese,the mean length in the pre-course lessonswa s 0.20 sec as simple, brief responsesdo not need long pauses. For the corres-ponding lessons in English, the pause was,1.45 sec. Although most questions stillrequired o n e - w o r d answers, th e longerpause reflected the greater reluctanceof pupils to volunteer answers evensimple answers - when using English,resulting in a longer pause before th eteacher asked for an answer. Improvementsoccurred in the post-course lessons,with the mean length of pasue beingsimilar fo r lessons in both Chinese an dEnglish. It is clear from this that futuremicroteaching courses will need to allowmore opportunity fo r teachers to practisethe skill of asking questions which requirelonger responses and which discourageone-word responses.

Unde r the heading "habits whichdisrupt the flow of discussion" there wasa significantly greater tendency for theteachers to repeat their questions whenteaching in English. In fact, the percentageof questions repeated increased from about3% in the pre-course lessons to just over11% in the post-course lessons. Againthis is probably due to a lack of pupilresponse in English. Teachers tend there-fore to repeat their questions rather thanto encourage the pupils to answer them.There was little tendency for the teachers

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CUHK Education Journal Vol. 10 N o. 1,1982

to answer their own q uestions, in eitherlanguage, in the post-course lessons.However, they repeated pupil answerstoo often . This is a habit characteristicof the teacher and not a product of thelessons, as a similar number of answerswere repeated during post-course lessonsgiven in Chinese as well as in English.

2) Comparing th e level of questioning skillsbefore and after microteaching of HongKong pre-service teachers with thosein other countries.

A comparison the pre-course lessonperformance in Table 4 indicates thaton almost every questioning skill, th estandard of the Hong Kong pre-serviceteachers is lower than their overseascounterpa rts. This is particurly true for theskills of redirection, percent higher cogni-tive questions, percent teacher talk, andlength of (pupil) response. On only twoskills repeating own questions andrepetition of pupils' answers were theHong Kong teachers better than thosein both other countries. This can beinterpreted in terms of cultural differences.Th e traditionally passive nat ure of Chinesepupils discussed earlier is contrasted withtheir Western counterparts who for severalgenerations now have been encouragedto participate actively in lessons. Pre-service teachers in Western countries haveexperienced this themselves and so it isnatural that they should us e questioningskills to a greater extent in their ow n pre -course lessons.

A comparison of the lessons taughtimmediately after th e Hong Kong micro-teaching course shows that by providinguntrained teachers the opportunity topractise questioning skills, dramaticimprovements are possible. Th e percentageimprovement from pre-course to post-course lessons for many of the skills ismuch greater for the Hong Kong coursethan fo r those in the United States an dSweden. (This also helps to explain why 7of the skills in Table 4 show significantimprovements even though the Hong Kongsample size was small). On 6 of the ques-tioning skills, the performance of the

Hong Kong group is comparable to, orbet ter than, that of the overseas groups.This is particularly so for the percentof higher cognitive questions asked, and forth e number of times teachers repeatedtheir own questions. How ever, Hon gKong teachers still talk to o much whencompared to overseas teachers, and asktoo many questions which require onlyone-word answers and thus have a shortermean length of pause after each question.Although microteaching improves th e skillof redirection in Hong Kong teachersare having greater difficulty in involvingpupils in class disucssions.

ConclusionsThis study con firm s the effectivene ss of

microteaching in improving the questioningskills of teachers, even in a bilingual setting.As well as bringing about a reduction in theamount of teacher talk, there are improvementsin more specific questioning skills such asprompting, redirection, th e asking of higher-order cognitive questions, and the number ofquestions calling for longer responses. Improve-ments occurred fo r lessons taught in the mediumof Chinese as well as in English. Except for oneskill repeating questions there were nosignificant differences in performance for lessonstaught in either language medium.

With the present day emphasis on thediscovery approach and the need for teachersto encourage pupils to think things out forthemselves rather than to be passive recipientsof teacher explanations, teachers must be ableto use the technique of questioning effectively.Th e study shows that microteaching is oneeffective way of improving questioning skills.If the results obtained in the pre-course lessonsare typical of the many untrained teachersin our secondary school system, then thesituation is depressing. Criticisms are frequentlyheard of the inability of out school graduatesto think for themselves. Often, the use ofEnglish as a medium of instruction is heldup as the cause. This may only be part of thereason. As the study show, pre-course lessonsin both Chinese as well as English show a lowstandard of questioning ability. This too is

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Rex H ey worth Bilingual Micro teaching: An Analysis of Questioning

probably a major contributing factor. Furtherresearch with existing but untrained teachersis needed.

The study shows that after a course ofmicroteaching, th e standard of questioningskills of H ong Kong teac hers is com parab leto that of teachers in other countries. Certaindeficencies are apparent in the comparison,especially in the ability to redirect questions inorder to increase pupil participation, and toobtain longer responses and fewer one-wordresponses from pupils. There is still a tendencyfor teachers in Hong Kong to talk more thantheir overseas counterparts.Based on the findings of this study, severalmodifications could be made to future micro -teaching courses. Firstly, greater emphasisneeds to be put on questions which increaseth e level an d amount of pupil participation(Table 1, skills 7-9). This could be done byincluding an additional session to practise theseskills. Secondly, fo r lessons taught in the mediumof English, teachers need to be made more awareof how to use questioning skills so that thetendency to repeat their ow n questions whenpupils hesitate to respond is avoided.References1. Borg, W.R., Kelly, M.L., Langer, P., and

Gall, M . (1970) The Minicourse: a Mirco-teaching Approach to Teacher Education,Collier-Macmillan, London.2. Perrot , E., Applebee, A.N. , Watson, E.,an d Heap , B (1975) A self-instructional

Microteaching Course on 'Effective Ques-tioning' , Peterborough, England, GuildSound and Vision.3. H eyworth, R.M., 'Microteach ing: A Biling-ual Approach', Educational Journal, TheChinese Unviersity of Hong Kong. Vol. 9,N o. 2.

4 . Bredange, G., and Tingsell, J.G. (1974)Transfer and Adaptation to SwedishTeacher Taining of Minicourse 1: EffectiveQuestioning, Pedagogiska Institutionen.Lararhogskolan i Goteborg .

5 . Perrott, E. , Applebee, A.N., Heap, B.,an d Watson, E . (1975) 'Changes in Teach-ing Behaviour after Completing a Self-instructional Microteaching Course' , Pro-grammed Learning and EducationalTechnology, Vol. 12, No. 6.6 . Borg, W.R., (1971). Scoring Minicourse1 Pre-course an d Post-course videotapesBerkeley, California, Far West Laboratoryfo r Educational Research and Develop-me nt, Evaluation Manual B7 1 1.7. Perrot , E. (1977). Microteaching in HigherEducation: Research, Development andPractice, SRHE Monograph, Universityof Surrey, England.8. OECD Repor t (1975). The InternationalTransfer of Microteaching Programmesfor Teacher Education, Centre for Educa-tional Research an d Innovation, Paris.

Mr . Re x Heyworth is Lecturer in Education,C U H K .

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