The study “Teachers’ language-promoting questions in primary classroom discourse: Relations with teacher expectations and student learning” by Lena Biele, Anna Volodina (Heidelberg University & Institute for Educational Quality Improvement (IQB)), Rebecca Höhr (Ludwigsburg University of Education), and Birgit Heppt examines teachers’ questions in German language and mathematics classroom discourse in primary schools. The authors investigate the language-promoting quality of teacher questions and their relations with teachers’ achievement related expectations and student achievement.

The study is based on video recordings of whole-classroom discourse, as well as questionnaire and competence including 329 first-grade students and 17 teachers from from 15 German language and 14 mathematics classrooms in Germany. The researchers coded the language-promoting quality of teacher questions and used multilevel models to examine associations between teacher expectations, teacher questions, and later student achievement in reading, vocabulary, and mathematics.

The results show that teacher questions were mostly of low language-promoting quality. Teachers asked more questions overall and used more open-ended questions that aim at elaboration and description in mathematics than in German language lessons. Evidence for class-level expectancy effects on teacher questions was limited. In mathematics, lower and inaccurate teacher expectations were associated with a higher frequency of questions that encouraged students to elaborate and describe. In addition, questions that encouraged students to reason, hypothesize, and conclude were positively related to vocabulary achievement at the classroom level.

Overall, the findings indicate that language-promoting questions occur comparatively rarely in content lessons and suggest that the effectiveness of teacher questioning may be domain-specific.

To the Article: Article in Learning and Instruction