This research aims at exploring the functions and meanings of teacher questions used as a teaching method in a Korean university course. The research site is a Chinese-Korean translation seminar course offered to juniors majoring in Chinese language and literature in a university in Seoul and the participants are 24 students including 8 male and 16 female students. The research questions pertain to first, finding out about teacher questions used in the course, second, classifying them into functions and frequencies, and third, analysing consequential conversation patterns around the teacher questions. A qualitative conversational analysis is applied as a main research method and a quantitative analysis of the frequencies of question types is additionally used.
The research procedures involve in 1) 150-minute-long classroom video-recording of the whole first two classroom sessions of a semester, 2) transcription of teacher questions and sequential response patterns, and 3) conversational analysis of the selected transcribed scenes. The major findings indicate that the teacher questions are categorized into general and language specific questions. First, general questions consist of 1) content comprehension questions, 2) answer elicitation request questions, 3) answer clarification questions, 4) suggestion questions, and 5) answer confirmation questions.
Second, language specific questions include questions intended to ask students their knowledge about 1) vocabulary between Chinese and Korean, in particular, Chinese synonyms, 2) direct and indirect translation, 3) grammar, and 4) culture. The most frequently used question type is answer elicitation request questions used 27 times. Unlike the previous studies displaying content comprehension questions as the most frequent question type, discussions about why answer elicitation request questions are most frequently used in this research are followed in addition to the discussions about the limitations and future research suggestions.