ABSTRACT
Questioning has long been a conspicuous feature of primary classrooms, comprising about one-fifth of teachers’ utterances (Galton et al., 1980). Teachers ask questions for many purposes – to control behaviour, as well as to seek, test, prompt, and reveal children’s ideas. At best, questioning is a powerful strategy for accessing students’ science knowledge and promoting learning. Yet there are aspects of the questioning strategy that often work against teaching and learning for understanding. When teachers lapse into what Elstgeest (1985) calls the ‘testing reflex’, students play the game of figuring out and responding to what they think is in the teacher’s head. In passing judgement on the student’s response, the teacher reinforces her role as the knowledge authority. This kind of interaction forms part of a three-part pattern of teacher–student dialogue, often referred to as Elicitation, Response and Feedback or ERF (Cazden, 1986; Mehan, 1979). Teachers and students learn this pattern as one of the unwritten and ingrained rules of the game of teaching and learning (Lemke, 1990).
