ABSTRACT
Questions are as old as speech itself, and the use of questions in teaching is at least as old as classrooms. Studies of questions may be traced from pre-Socratic philosophers through till modern times. In the nineteenth century questions were much discussed by school inspectors (Macnamara, 1980) and in the twentieth century there have been several studies of questioning. The first of the twentieth-century studies was probably by Stevens (1912), who reported that teachers in her sample asked about 395 questions per day. Similar results have been reported by Corey (1940), Floyd (1960), Flanders (1970) and Wragg (1973). Generally speaking, it seems that teachers spend about 30 per cent of their time asking questions. In other words they may ask about 100 questions per hour. There are wide variations in rates of asking questions, depending on the subject, the ages and abilities of the pupils and the experience of the teachers.
