How Should Teachers Address Students?

“Would you like to tidy up now?” An analysis of adult questioning in the English Foundation Stage?

There has been much controversy within the class room in how teachers should address their students, to see whether the correct route to follow is through open and or closed questions. A study conducted by Siraj-Blatchford et al (2003, 2004) which extended the analysis concerned with adult questioning carried out in the Research Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY) study, which further drew out quantitative data to the five-year longitudinal study The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) (Sammons et al. 2002, 2003), looking at the progress of 3000 children in 141 pre-schools. In this extension the analysis identified a total of 5808 questions across 400 hours which observed 28 staff recorded in 2000-2001. The aim of the study was to provide a more thorough analysis on the types of questions applied, and to investigate the possibility that the use of open-ended questions have an effect on a child’s development, particularly in supporting them.by looking at It was found that 94.5% of all the qiestions asked by the early year staff were closed questions that required recall or facts. It was found that only 5.5% were opened ended questions. The main aim of study this article is to code and rationale for the seven types of closed questions and four types of open-ended questions that are most commonly asked by early year staff.

In this experiment there is a strong sense of credibility making the method and the findings very reliable. This is due to the study being a continuous longitudinal study that applies a mixed method design (Creswell 2003, Siraj- Blatchford et al 2006). Mixed methods are where a researcher mix...

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