ABSTRACT
Teachers’ questions play a key role in meaning-making and understanding. Teachers pose questions to structure classroom interactions and through them pave the way for scaffolding students’ learning process, which is why the role of questioning exchanges becomes “a fruitful area to explore” (Chin, 20074, p. 816). At a time when English-medium instruction (EMI) has become the cornerstone of an increasing number of higher education institutions’ strategic plans to foster the internationalisation process, its rapid implementation has outpaced research on issues such as how questioning practices are affected by the use of English as medium of instruction. In this study, four EMI history teachers were videotaped and the transcripts of their classes were analysed with a view to characterising the classroom discourse models and the role of productive thinking in teacher–students exchanges. The results showed that more than half of the class interactions were characterised by a significant amount of teacher-led questions which did not elicit any response from the students. Secondly, we saw that while the authoritative approach predominated, the dialogic approach was also present. Finally, the promotion of productive thinking, although encouraged by teachers, was limited because many answers were left unanswered by students. We outline the pedagogical implications that these results entail.
