An investigation of teachers questioning technique in developing EFL students critical thinking ability

This study was aimed to investigate teachers’ questioning techniques in developing students’ critical thinking ability that were common in the EFL classroom. This study also seeks to categorise the frequency' of lower-order cognitive question and higherorder cognitive questions. The difficulties faced by the teachers during teachers’ questioning sessions and how the teachers addressed the problems, and teachers’ perspective on developing students' critical thinking through questioning were also examined. A case study design was selected for this study. Six English language teachers from a university in Indonesia were selected as participants through the purposive sampling method. The research instruments used in this study were classroom observation checklists and interview protocol. Data collected were analysed using thematic analysis and frequency counts. The findings showed that all participants used the six cognitive level questions based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, they were knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The results also indicated that the teachers asked lower-order questions more frequently. Students’ background knowledge and English language proficiency level were the students’ problems faced by the teachers during questioning. Students tend to keep silent during questioning. Different techniques were used by the teachers to elicit students’ responses, they were repetition, rephrasing, simplification, decomposition and probing. Despite holding different perspectives concerning the development of students’ critical thinking, all teachers were aware of questioning sessions conducted in the classroom can help the development of students’ critical thinking ability. As a conclusion, appropriate types of questioning and questioning technique can help the development of students’ critical thinking skills. The implication of this study suggested that the use of questioning would enhance students’ critical thinking development and could raise awareness of the role of question types and questioning techniques in developing students’ critical thinking.