Teachers questions: Do they encourage critical thinking?

We can easily underline that today there are two related terms with society:knowledge and technology. Every person living in a society should always thinkcritically in order to cope with a developing technology and knowledge. Besidesanalytical skills, firstly critical thinking abilities should be taught to help students inthe process.Developing individuals who posse critical thinking skills, is one of the mostimportant goals of our education system. Teachers, instructors, and lecturers play agreat role in developing critical thinking. Considering the classroom environment,teachers can do different tasks to promote this; for example, they can start a classdiscussion by which students can have the chance to express their personal opinions.Topics given should ideally encourage students to do research, synthesize the relevantideas and present them in a logical way. Furthermore, teachers can act as facilitatorspromoting students? critical thinking abilities by asking questions which can fosterstudents? ability to analyze, synthesize, reason, and express their ideas freely.Paying attention to the importance of the questions in developing criticalthinking skills, the aim of this study is to identify what kind of questions teachers askat Intermediate level in Listening / Speaking courses at Anadolu University School ofForeign Languages. Moreover, the study aims to find out whether the questions askedby the teachers include High- Order questions or not.The study was conducted in 2005- 2006 at Anadolu University School ofForeign Languages with eight teachers teaching 400 students at Intermediate level.The eight teachers were video- recorded for eight class hours over a week period intheir Listening / Speaking courses. It has to be underlined that from those eightteachers, three teachers were chosen based on their teaching experiences and theirnative languages and the recordings of those particular teachers were analyzed. Thetotal process of recording lasted for three weeks between the 12th of December 2005and 2nd of January 2006.The findings of the study revealed that teachers ask different types ofquestions. Since the focus of the study was the High- Order Questions, the resultsindicated that the percentage of the High- Order Questions asked inListening/Speaking classes is not high.Key Words: Questions, High- Order Questions, Language Teaching,Classroom Discourse