The third dimension of categorization is related to the purpose or function of questions: whether it is for displaying facts or for communication。 Faced with the former type of questions, learners are expected to display the facts which they have learned from the texts and meanwhile teachers usually know the answers beforehand。 The latter types of questions relate to the so-called referential questions originally given by Long & Sato (1983: 268)．Long and Sato draw a clear differentiation between two major categories of classroom questions: display and referential questions。 Display questions basically refer to the questions to elicit pre-determined factual response; such questions are usually asked for confirmation checks, comprehension checks, or clarification requests。 While referential questions are related to those questions of which the teacher does not know the answers。 Brock (1986) carries out a study and finds that there are more referential questions asked by teachers after their training。 Also, referential questions bring notably longer and more complex responses from students。论文网

    2。1。3 Questioning Strategies

    In general, questioning strategies refer to skills adopted by teachers when they ask questions so as to get good answers from the students。 In order to initiate the learning motivation of students and elicit utterance of high quality, teachers use effective strategies to raise questions。

    Numerous researchers focus on the questioning strategies。 Perrott (1982) and Jacobsen et al。 (1999) study the classroom questioning and pide questioning strategies into four types: self-explaining, prompting, probing and redirecting questions。

    Self-explaining is usually adopted by teachers to raise questions with easier words and simpler sentence structures。 By means of these strategies, teachers will move away the hindrance of students’ understanding greatly。

    Prompting refers to that kind of strategy used by teachers to give hints to students when they utter an incorrect , a weak responses, or even “I don’t know” according to Perrott (1982: 13)。

    Probing is another questioning technique to induce more complex or deep reply (Jacobson et al。, 1999)。 By probing, teachers guide students to have more critical thinking and then defend or deepen their answers。

Redirecting means that the same question is answered by different students。 Jacobson et al。 (1999) propose that different answers from several learners are accepted and acknowledged。

    2。1。4 Waiting time

    Waiting time is a vital component in the procedure of classroom questioning, which refers to the length of time the teacher waits between raising a question and asking students to answer it or offering the answer。 However, students usually don’ t have enough time to answer the questions in that teachers tend to provide short waiting time so as to quicken the learning procedure。

    Rowe (1974) stated that increasing the wait-time after questions leads to the increased length of   students’ response, a greater frequency of answering questions, a greater degree of participation in lessons。 Long & Sato (1983: 285) proposed that students become more active in learning when given three to five seconds of waiting time。 

2。2 Learning Motivation

    2。2。1 Definition of Learning Motivation

    It is hard to give a clear definition to motivation。 Originated from the Latin word motives (a moving cause), motivation turns up at the vocabulary list of philosophy and psychology in the 20th century。 As for its literal meaning, motivation refers to the inner force that drives people to achieve their goals。 From a psychological perspective, Gardner (1985: 10) maintains that learning motivation is the combination of effort plus desire to achieve the goal of learning language plus favorable attitudes towards learning language。 His definition includes three components, which are respectively the effort spent to achieve a goal, the desire to learn language and the fulfillment with the task of learning the language。 Gardner claims that all these three components are of tremendous necessity to properly describe motivation in language learning。