Structuring Phrasing F ocusing
The 2nd TIE ALLSAW Conference, December 7th-8th 2015
questions. In classroom setting, Cotton 2003 claimed that teacher questions and student answers are considered a powerful teaching approach if they are used to expose contradictions,
challenge assumption, and lead to new wisdom and knowledge. To vitalize the classroom questions, teachers should design questions which can expand students’ knowledge and promote
creative thinking. Traditionally, science has been thought of as an area with minimal language demands. In
fact, science and language are intricately connected —language facilitates science thinking.
Today’s emphasis on problem solving and communication in science means, more than ever, that students must be skilled in using at least the basic language of science. Learning science
means developing new ways of thinking about the world through investigations that predict and control natural phenomena. Students learn to reason in ways that are considered logical as they
come to understand and reproduce the same framework of meaning that the teachers understand about an issue. An important aspect of this is using vocabulary and grammatical forms
effectively to construe scientific meanings. Controlling the discourse of science requires mastering the grammatical features of the language that construe science knowledge as well as
the reasoning, values and assumptions of the discipline. Lemke 1990: 9β points out that “the language of science teaching is ‘expository’ or ‘analytical’.
Cameron 2001: 81 states that when introduced into the L2 classroom, young learners need very concrete vocabulary that connects with objects they can handle or see. They have a
reputation for being natural language learners. Their learning of a language is simply to place them in the target language setting. As an alternative way of placing them in the target language
setting is by develops their active involvement with the environment. They are involved in their surrounding activities. Piaget 2001: 87 states that children are not simply miniature adults who
have less experience and thus less knowledge to work with as they approach problems and new situations. They do not think like adults because their minds are not like adult minds. It is the
privilege of the elementary school teacher to share their world and learn to work within it. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
There are two kinds of teacher’s questioning. The first is the teachers’ questioning in which the main function is to control the class during the lesson, for example, reminding the
students to be quiet, checking the students’ attendance, and setting the seating arrangement. The second is the teacher’s questioning which has the main function is to conduct the lesson. In the
second terms, it included some discussion such as the types of questions, the level of questions, and how the teachers pose the questions to the students.
Basic questioning skills have nine components. Those components are covered in Turney 1983:97-98. According to Turney, basic questioning skill components are structuring,
phrasing, focusing, re-directing, distributing, pausing, reacting, prompting, changing the level of cognitive demand. The detailed explanations of the components are as follows: