Abstract
Given the challenging nature of effective teacher questioning, teachers often need support in asking more learning-conducive questions. However, little research has explored how professional development initiatives could contribute to language teachers’ effective questioning practices and the cognitions behind them. To address this gap, the present study explored the contributions of a classroom-based mentoring initiative to three Hong Kong English-language teachers’ development of questioning skills, drawing on a microgenetic analysis perspective. Data included rounds of teacher–mentor conversations and semi-structured interviews conducted with the teachers at the end of the program. Data analyses showed that as the teachers became better at identifying question types and provided increasingly sophisticated reasoning for their questioning practices, they gradually increased their talk in mentoring sessions, whereas the mentor's talk decreased. Furthermore, the teachers reported heightened awareness of questioning's contributions to student learning and a shift toward dialogic questioning, which they associated with increased student engagement and enjoyment. We discuss the implications of these findings for language teachers and teacher educators regarding how questioning can be integrated into mentoring initiatives to improve teachers’ questioning skills.
Keywords
Introduction
As a complex form of support for individual learning that involves ‘counselling and professional friendship’ (Rhodes and Beneicke, 2002: 301), mentoring has been well recognized in current discussions of teaching and teacher education ‘as a means to enhance professional development, embed changed practice and encourage the transmission of teacher learning to pupil learning within classrooms’ (297). Mentoring has been conceptualized in various ways, ranging from peer-to-peer support to hierarchical relationships where more experienced colleagues guide novices (Kennedy, 2005; Nguyen, 2017). Core elements that make mentoring an effective tool for language teacher growth include fostering collaborative reflection, enabling mutual support and engendering emotional empowerment (Gakonga, 2019; Wyatt and Dikilitaş, 2022). Mentoring can encompass diverse aspects and is applicable to a wide range of issues, from classroom instructional practices to institutional policies and broader sociocultural factors (Nguyen et al., 2025; Yuan, 2016).
Despite the growth of research on various aspects of mentoring, little research has examined how mentoring can help in-service language teachers develop classroom questioning skills. This stands in contrast to existing research on questioning-focused mentoring among teacher education students and teachers of non-language subjects (e.g. Edwards-Groves, 2014; Hudson, 2013; Pena and Almaguer, 2007; Pylman and Bell, 2021). In classroom discourse, language teacher questions have traditionally been categorized as display and referential ones (Long and Sato, 1983), typically starting initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) chains of information exchange (Heritage and Heritage, 2013). However, research on language teacher questioning has since evolved beyond this descriptive framework to examine how discourse patterns and interactional sequences contribute to student and teacher learning, highlighting the pedagogical significance of questioning in professional and educational development (Uştuk and Hu, 2025a; Jiang, 2014).
Although questioning is widely recognized as crucial, a key challenge lies in helping teachers ask more effective questions, as pointed out by Chin (2006) and Farrell and Mom (2015). However, this issue has remained under-studied, with limited translation from theory to classroom implementation. In this multiple-case study, we explore how mentoring can support English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers in developing their questioning skills, using microgenetic analysis to trace fine-grained changes in their pedagogical growth. By tracking the teachers’ questioning development microgenetically, the study aims to inform EFL and other language teachers of effective questioning practices and provide teacher educators with strategies for enhancing teacher questioning skills in professional development programs.
Literature review
Language teacher questioning
Questions constitute a significant part of teachers’ pedagogical decision-making in the classroom (Ho, 2005). However, as Senior (2006) argued, many teachers are not predisposed to ‘reflect on the reasons that underlie their classroom decision making’ (237). This issue is particularly noticeable in classroom questioning, the messy nature of which has motivated researchers to develop various taxonomies of teacher questions to capture interactional patterns. For example, earlier discussions on teacher questioning focused on how chains of interaction are constructed between teachers and students, often in the form of IRE or initiation-response-feedback-response-feedback sequences (Cazden, 1988; Mortimer and Scott, 2003). This form of teacher–student interaction, which centers on the impact of classroom talk on student learning, has received notable attention in recent years (e.g. Chan and Chung, 2024; Chow et al., 2023; Qin et al., 2025), due to the rise of dialogic teaching (Teo, 2019). Its roots in second-language acquisition date back decades, when teacher/student talk, conversational chains, dialogic support, task engagement and negotiation of meaning were central topics in classroom discourse studies (e.g. Long and Sato, 1983).
In an influential taxonomy, Chin (2007) proposed four distinct approaches to teacher questioning: Socratic questioning (i.e. using a series of questions to scaffold students’ thought development dialogically), verbal jigsaw (using questions that focus on scientific terms or key words/phrases to help students construct declarative knowledge and develop a coherent understanding of related concepts), semantic tapestry (guiding students in integrating disparate ideas into a conceptual framework through multi-pronged questions that often require multimodal reasoning at both macro and micro levels) and framing (using questions to frame a problem/issue/topic and structure the ensuing discussion by helping students focus their thinking and see links). Collectively, these questioning approaches highlight the importance of teacher questions in scaffolding student learning through talk. Another well-established framework for teacher questioning builds on Bloom's taxonomy of educational learning objectives (i.e. both the original [Bloom et al., 1956] and the revised [Anderson et al., 2001] version) that emphasizes cognitive demand and the discursive representation of thinking processes (i.e. remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating). Taking a cognitive perspective, this framework views teacher questions as characterized by varying cognitive demand and different levels of dialogicality (Caravaca, 2019; Uştuk and Hu, 2025a; Uştuk et al., 2025; Wong, 2010). The mentoring program that we developed for this study was informed by this conceptualization (Uştuk and Hu, 2025a), as we explain later.
Over the past decade, empirical research on language teacher questioning has also grown (e.g. Banitalebi and Ghiasvand, 2023; Farrell and Mom, 2015; Pun and Macaro, 2019; Svanes and Andersson-Bakken, 2023; Uştuk and Hu, 2025a, 2025b; Uştuk et al., 2025c). For instance, Farrell and Mom (2015) explored four English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers’ beliefs about and practices in questioning through classroom observations and interviews. The study revealed that although the teachers’ classroom questioning practices were mostly consistent with their stated beliefs, there were several incongruities. Of particular relevance to the present study, those teachers became more cognizant of how their beliefs impacted their classroom practices as a result of engaging in a reflective process whereby they ‘articulated and reflected on their beliefs about their use of questions’ (849). In another study, Svanes and Andersson-Bakken (2023) collected classroom observations at 4 primary schools and recordings of 32 language arts lessons to uncover how teachers made use of open questions. The study found that the teachers used open questions mainly for class management but also asked subject-specific open questions to mediate students’ understanding of the values of the subject. The extant literature demonstrates that teacher questioning is a significant part of teachers’ daily work and that, as Farrell and Mom (2015) argued, teachers need to become more aware of how they practice questioning in the classroom and why. The present study aimed to foster such awareness through mentoring to support professional development.
Mentoring in language teacher education
Mentoring was traditionally seen as a technique in which an authority, usually an experienced colleague, transmitted knowledge to less experienced teachers. However, this view of a passive process has shifted substantially toward a constructionist conceptualization of mentoring as an active, reflective and inquiry-driven relationship between colleagues (Nguyen, 2017; Nguyen et al., 2025). Relatedly, the literature on coaching language teachers (e.g. Li B and Chan, 2007; Renn et al., 2024; Sherman and Teemant, 2025) has grown substantially in response to the limitations of traditional, top-down mentoring approaches. The central tenet of mentoring is not to address a lack of knowledge on the part of the less experienced teacher but to help ‘that which is tacit become more explicit’ (Dennen, 2004: 817). To actualize this process, a dialogic relationship between mentor and mentee should be formed so that their interactions can shape each other's discursive representations. Gakonga (2019) proposed a multi-dimensional conceptualization of mentoring in language education, which is centered on three types of support: emotional support (developing an empathetic, supportive, non-hierarchical and non-judgmental relationship), technical support (modeling effective practices and providing practical tips about pedagogical alternatives) and support with reflection (developing reflective practice that allows the mentee to explore her/his practice, question established ways of doing things and continue to improve). These three types of support were incorporated into our mentoring program in the present study, as we explain in the Method section.
Mentoring has also been the focus of many research studies in recent years (for a recent collection, see Nguyen et al., 2025) due to its key role in language teacher professional development (e.g., Karim and Nazari, 2021; Karimi and Norouzi, 2017; Smith et al., 2023). For example, Karim and Nazari (2021) drew on a sociocultural perspective and explored growth in two EFL teachers’ understanding of differentiated instruction. A microgenetic analysis of the data gathered from scaffolding sessions and classroom observations revealed changes in both the language they used to represent differentiated instruction and the scope of their understanding. Furthermore, Smith et al. (2023) reported on a mentoring program for EFL teachers in China which led both the mentor and participant teachers to feel transformed. The mentor and mentees took a step further and explored what contributed to their transformative experiences by writing and analyzing their reflections. Such a reflective practice yielded insights into the teachers’ greater empowerment and ability to bridge theory and practice.
The literature reviewed above demonstrates that: (a) questioning is a key component of language teachers’ instructional practice; (b) research on how teachers can be supported to enhance their classroom questioning is scarce; (c) classroom-based mentoring has an important role in improving different aspects of teachers’ practices; and (d) little is known about the potential of mentoring to foster more effective questioning practices in teachers. To bridge this empirical gap, the present study explored the contributions of mentoring to the questioning skills of three EFL teachers working in Hong Kong secondary schools. To this end, we drew on microgenetic analysis to capture their incremental growth and thus provide an in-depth account of teacher change (Karim and Nazari, 2021).
The following research question guided our study: how does a classroom-based mentoring program contribute to secondary-school EFL teachers’ effective questioning skills and cognitions about questioning practices?
Method
Context and participants
This study was conducted in the context of Hong Kong secondary education. Considering the myriad challenges Hong Kong teachers face in their classroom questioning, this context adds value to exploring how mentoring can help teachers ask more effective questions. For example, Pan and Chen (2022) found that Hong Kong students ‘seem to be reluctant to answer questions voluntarily or enthusiastically’ (51). In Hepple's (2012) study of pre-service teachers’ transnational school experience, most of the 16 pre-service EFL teachers from Hong Kong reported that in Hong Kong classrooms, it was teachers’ prerogative to initiate activities and direct students through their authoritative discourse, whereas students ‘just follow[ed] the teacher instruction’ (316). As one of the pre-service teachers put it, ‘back in Hong Kong you know students are really passive because it's always the teacher talking’ (318). Other studies (i.e. Lo and Macaro, 2012; Pun and Macaro, 2019) found a predominance of lower-order questions in English-mediuminstruction (EMI) classrooms in Hong Kong schools. These challenges suggest that teacher questioning could be a rich area to explore in teacher professional development. Investigating this issue would provide a valuable opportunity to examine whether and how classroom-based mentoring helps teachers transform both their classroom practices and underlying cognitions.
To address our research question, we adopted a multiple-case study design, which enabled an in-depth examination of a small number of informative cases to answer the why and how questions (Yin, 2018). This approach also facilitated cross-case comparisons, supporting theoretical generalization. In line with the tenets of case study design (Yin, 2018), the participants in this study were purposively drawn from a pool of secondary school teachers involved in a larger project that aimed to explore the contributions of a professional development program to participating teachers’ questioning skills. With their schools’ permission, these teachers agreed to participate in the larger project. For this study, we selected three teachers (two females and one male) whose data were fully collected at the time of writing, based on two criteria. First, they were novice teachers with a BA in education and less than three years of teaching experience. Studying novice teachers, as Kennedy (2005) and Karimi and Norouzi (2017) argue, can offer clearer insights into how mentoring shapes cognitive development. Second, they were teaching the same school subject, namely English, which would allow us to identify, through cross-case comparisons, commonalities in how the mentoring program would contribute to the professional development of questioning strategies.
Data collection
To microgenetically track how professional development through mentoring contributed to the teachers’ cognitions regarding questioning practices, we collected data from successive classroom observations and mentoring sessions (i.e. debriefings) following the observations. The mentor, who was an experienced language teacher educator and had research expertise in classroom discourse, made an initial observation of each teacher's classroom teaching to become familiar with their regular questioning practices. The teachers then attended a two-hour workshop conducted in English by the mentor, which focused on the principles and evidence-based practices of classroom questioning. The promoted approach was characterized by the synergistic weaving of authoritative/dialogic and lower/higher-order questions in classroom interactions (see Uştuk and Hu, 2025a, for the pedagogical framework). The workshop also involved the teachers in reflecting on teacher questions found in the pre-workshop classroom observations and practicing different types of teacher questions, explained and illustrated by examples from previous research, classroom observations and instructional materials used in Hong Kong secondary schools.
Following the workshop, each teacher was observed three times in their classroom by the mentor. Each observed class lasted about 50 minutes and was audio-recorded to capture the teacher’s questions in interactions with students. Immediately after the classroom observation, the mentor held a debriefing session (about 20 minutes) with the teacher, during which the mentor prompted the teacher to reflect on the reasoning behind the questions asked and their alignment with the authoritative/dialogic and lower-/higher-order dimensions of the questioning framework. The mentor also suggested alternative questioning approaches, where appropriate. This two-step procedure was repeated for the remaining two observations to collect thick classroom data and contextualized teacher reflections. Following the principles of mentoring proposed by Gakonga (2019), the mentor strived to create an empathetic, stress-free, non-judgmental environment (emotional support), provided pedagogical alternatives to model how questions could become more dialogic and cognitively stretching (technical support) and consistently encouraged the teachers to reflect on their questioning practices to make their underlying cognition explicit (support with reflection). Immediately after the debriefing for the last classroom observation, the mentor conducted a semi-structured interview (about 30 minutes) to elicit the the teacher's experience with and perceptions of the mentoring program, any perceived changes in their questioning practices and factors contributing to the changes.
In summary, the full dataset for this study comprised 12 classroom observations, 3 individual workshops, 9 debriefing sessions and 3 semi-structured interviews. The data from each participating teacher were collected within a span of two months.
Data analysis
Due to our interest in the microgenesis of the teachers’ developing cognition about questioning, we focused chiefly on the debriefing sessions and the interviews in our data analysis. Microgenetic analysis, rooted in Vygotsky's (1978) sociocultural theory, is an analytical approach often used to understand how cognitive processes change on a small timescale, especially during the acquisition of a new cognitive skill. Given its emphasis on ‘studying the process of learning by collecting a sample showing the potential for rapid learning’ (Copur-Gencturk and Atabas, 2024: 6) and its focus on how less experienced individuals can develop capability (Berducci, 2004), the microgenetic approach was well suited to tracking how the focal teachers responded to the mentoring program. Furthermore, Siegler (2007) identifies three properties of microgenetic analyses, all of which were present in this study: (a) a focus on rapidly changing competence; (b) dense observations and corresponding data sources; and (c) intense analysis of observations to infer the associated processes. Although microgenetic analyses may have limitations, such as decreasing participant motivation, increasing boredom, potential practice effects and the time-consuming and complex nature of the approach (Li L, 2024), this approach is valuable for tracking how individuals change over time, which aligns with our purposes. Notably, except for the time-consuming and complex nature of the approach, none of the other above-mentioned limitations occurred in this study.
Our moment-to-moment analysis of discourse was guided by Vygotsky's (1987) recommendation about the unit of analysis ‘being a part of the whole, comprising all of the key characteristics of the whole’ (46). Since a microgenetic analysis focuses on ‘grasp[ing] the process in flight’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 68), we considered each debriefing session as a unit in which we could capture how the teachers developed their understanding of classroom questioning as the process in focus. In this regard, the teachers’ utterances were thematized to track how they changed across the sessions. This form of microgenetic analysis of peer-to-peer interactions has also been adopted in previous research (e.g. Karim and Nazari, 2021).
Furthermore, we used the interview data as complements to the teachers’ discourse in the debriefing sessions to see whether the mentoring activities were effective for the teachers. The interviews were analyzed in line with the six-phase procedure for thematic analysis developed by Braun and Clarke (2021). We first read the interview transcripts repeatedly to become familiar with the data before we developed codes to capture the semantic and latent meanings of the data. We then developed themes from the codes by comparing, grouping and regrouping them in light of the coded data extracts and the whole set of interviews. Our focus was on how the teachers viewed classroom questioning and the contributions of the mentoring program to their cognitions and practice regarding questioning. The initially abstracted themes were reviewed and defined, and data extracts illustrative of the themes were selected for reporting.
Findings
Moment-to-moment (i.e. microgenetic) analyses revealed that although the teachers were initially hesitant to embrace the mentoring activity in the first debriefing session, they gradually developed their understanding of the questioning techniques. In particular, two themes emerged from the teacher–mentor debriefing conversations that demonstrated their growing understanding of teacher questioning. These themes were also supported by the interviews. It should be noted that our presentation below uses comparative terms to describe the teachers’ cognitions of classroom questioning, as they already had some understanding prior to the workshop and debriefing sessions. In what follows, extracts from the conversations between the teachers and the mentor are presented to illustrate the themes.
Growing adeptness at identifying question types with reduced scaffolding from the mentor
In the first mentoring session, the teachers were uncertain about several types of questions (i.e. questions aimed at understanding, analyzing, applying, etc.), which led the mentor to invite the teachers to reflect on and identify the questions they used in their observed lessons, increasing the mentor's share of talk in the debriefing conversation. The teachers used hesitant markers like ‘I guess’ (T3), ‘I think’ (T1) and uncertain giggles (T2) when identifying question types, suggesting that they had not yet fully internalized the types of questioning techniques introduced in the workshop. However, through subsequent classroom teaching and the debriefing sessions that stimulated reflection on their questioning practices, they gradually gained confidence and accuracy in their identification of different question types. Crucially, as the teachers became more adept at recognizing question types, they contributed more actively to the debriefing discussions, lessening the mentor's role in guiding the conversations.
The pattern of development described above is evident in the following conversations from the three debriefing sessions with T3. T3's uncertainty about the nature of a question she used was apparent in her reply (delivered in a rising tone) to the mentor's second question in the extract from the first debriefing session. In the second debriefing session, although she was able to classify her classroom questions with greater certainty, she was still in need of further support from the mentor. However, in the third debriefing session, she was able not only to identify her question accurately but also to provide a convincing justification.
Session 1.
(sharing an observational note) ‘Do you remember what part of speech do we use after prefer?’ That's the first question you asked. What do you think about this question?
Um, I was hoping they can remember and reflect.
Based on that, where do you think this question is based on the cognitive demand and interactional orientation? (referring to the four quadrants of teacher questions in a worksheet formed along the dimensions of lower/higher cognitive demand and authoritative/dialogic orientation)
Here? (referring to a worksheet quadrant)
Session 2.
(repeating the teacher's questions in the observed lesson) ‘Have you ever been to hiking? What is the story of this picture?’ Can you tell me about the cognitive demand of this question?
I think it's more like ‘remembering’ (the mentor looking for the worksheet).
What about its interactional orientation?
It's more authoritative.
Yes.
Session 3.
(repeating classroom questions from the observed lesson) ‘Is it [the glass] full or not? If it is half full, how is it different from somebody who thinks it is half empty?’ What do you think about this question?
It is differentiating.
Is it dialogic or authoritative?
Kind of mix of both, like, I have answers to expect but I am also open to other answers.
Right.
Increasingly sophisticated reasoning about questioning practices
Another key dimension of the teachers’ cognitive development was their growing ability to articulate sophisticated rationales for their in-class questions as the debriefing sessions progressed. They were better able to provide coherent and detailed reasoning about why they used questions in certain ways in their instruction. For example, the following extracts from the debriefing conversations demonstrate that T1 was increasingly able to reason about the questions he employed in his lessons. Although he was hesitant in classifying a particular question in the first debriefing conversation, he was able to provide a detailed rationale for his questioning practice by the third session, drawing on the knowledge learned in the workshop and the mentor's previous explanations. Importantly, the teacher was able to link theoretical knowledge about questioning (i.e. the technical terms and the related explanations) to classroom practice (i.e. the questioning types).
Session 1.
(repeating the teacher's question from the observed lesson) ‘What is the difference between grill and steam-fried food?’ What do you think about the cognitive level of this question?
(looking at the worksheet) Ah! Cognitive level, I think it's maybe in a new but similar situation.
So, what is the [cognitive] level?
‘Apply’ (together with the mentor).
In that case, is it a higher-order or lower-order question?
Higher-order?
Yes.
Session 2.
(repeating a question from the teacher's observed lesson) ‘What did you eat yesterday?’ What do you think about this question? Is it an authoritative or dialogic question?
I think it depends on how you see it. To me, I would say it could be quite dialogic as there are no right or wrong answers.
Yes, quite right.
Session 3.
And then, you used wh-questions. It is called 6WH at your school? And you asked the students to use these words to talk about new situations. What do you think about the cognitive level of this question?
‘Apply’.
Why?
I would like them to engage because they have to correct the mistakes, I didn’t want them to stay in the language level … to explain their ideas. So, actually, after two days, they should finish a worksheet, so to help them generate an example. So, I wanted to give them some trials.
Gravitating toward a pedagogy of dialogicality
Our thematic analysis of the interviews uncovered additional themes regarding the teachers’ developing questioning practices. One such theme was a common gravitation toward a dialogic questioning approach. They explained that the mentoring activities made them develop a deeper understanding of the usefulness of dialogic questions in constructing productive classroom interactions and enhancing student engagement. For example, T1 stated: I became familiar with this Bloom's taxonomy at university, but it was not practical or applied until the sessions [support sessions]. To be honest, after this program, I tend to ask more dialogic questions, especially in the one-minute talk activity. In this activity, I try to ask more questions and engage the students to ask more questions to make it more dialogic, and I guess students quite enjoy it. Moreover, it allows me not to just look for answers, and by asking a chain of questions, I come to know their thinking by not making the interaction one-shot but rather long.
In the above interview extract, T1 contrasted his formal university instruction in Bloom's taxonomy with the mentoring program on productive questioning. While the former remained at a theoretical level, the latter helped him gain a practical perspective on how dialogic questions could be utilized to achieve multiple pedagogical purposes – gauging students’ understanding, fostering inter-thinking and enhancing student engagement. Furthermore, he underscored the role of dialogic questions in making learning enjoyable for his students.
Similarly, T3 recalled how she became increasingly drawn to promoting dialogicality in her classroom: I would say at the beginning, when I asked questions, my intention was more to lead students toward the answer that I wanted. But now it can also be the same, but I pay more attention to what kind of thinking I want the students to do when I ask questions. I can get students to think, how to say, like, lead them into higher-level thinking instead of just always checking understanding, but maybe push them a bit.
Heightened awareness of teacher questioning and its contributions to classroom learning
Another area of the teachers’ cognitive development, revealed in the interviews, concerned their increased awareness of teacher questioning as a pedagogical tool. They noted that they developed greater awareness of how questioning could be applied practically in the classroom to enhance student engagement, promote teacher–student interactions and develop a more learning-conducive classroom environment. For example, T2 commented on how the mentoring program made her more aware of the pedagogy of questioning: The program was pretty good because I became more self-aware of the types of questions that I was asking. Because personally I always thought I ask, like, generic kind of questions, and I came to know how to make the questions not generic. Especially that I came to ask more questions that I did not know the answer to, and this made the students think more.
One significant factor contributing to such heightened awareness of questioning as a pedagogical practice was the feedback the teachers received from the mentor on their observed lessons. During the interview, T3 commented on the affordances of the specific feedback on her lessons she received in the debriefing sessions: I really enjoyed the feedback I got because that was specific to my lessons. You really helped me become aware of suggestions and how I can improve from the previous time, and what kind of questions I could ask to move the students toward higher levels of thinking. I could say that the kind of questions that I am asking now is based on the feedback.
Discussion
The data presented in the preceding section demonstrate that the mentoring program was successful in enhancing the teachers’ knowledge and awareness of classroom questioning. As the debriefing sessions progressed, the teachers became more capable of identifying different types of teacher questions and their functions. To be sure, this is not a new finding. What is novel is that the teachers became increasingly more independent in accurately classifying their classroom questions and were able to assume an ever greater role in the debriefing sessions, resulting in a larger share of the conversation for themselves and a reduced share for the mentor over time. Previous research on mentoring (e.g. Gakonga, 2019; Nguyen, 2017) has shown that interactional feedback between mentor and mentee is an important dimension of mentoring, as such feedback can guide the mentee toward reaching their optimal potential (see also Kennedy, 2005). In addition to providing further empirical support for this finding, our microgenetic analysis also unpacked the dynamics of mentor–mentee interaction. Specifically, our study demonstrates how the conversational contributions of both parties (i.e. the relative amounts of talk contributed by the teachers and the mentor, as well as their mutual influences on the teachers’ growing understanding of productive questioning) changed over the course of mentoring sessions, a finding that has rarely been documented in previous research. Thus, it reveals how the teachers’ cognitions of questioning developed dynamically and incrementally as a result of the mentoring initiative that they experienced. Furthermore, our findings partly mirror those of previous research on challenges of effective classroom questioning for teachers (e.g. Lo and Macaro, 2012; Pan and Chen, 2022; Pun and Macaro, 2019), but they also highlight the affordances of mentoring not only in addressing those challenges but in enabling teachers to develop a deeper understanding of their questioning practice. This extends previous scholarship on how mentoring can help teachers become aware of, and make explicit, their cognitions (e.g. Karimi and Norouzi, 2017) in the under-explored context of teacher questioning.
Additionally, over the course of the mentoring sessions, the teachers were able to articulate increasingly sophisticated rationales for the questions they used in their classroom instruction. Although their reasoning was colored by doubts in the first debriefing sessions, they gradually came to provide a more integrated and coherent perspective on their classroom questioning in light of the contextualized knowledge provided in the debriefing sessions. As has been consistently argued, technical knowledge is a key dimension of effective mentoring (Gakonga, 2019; Nguyen, 2017; Nguyen et al., 2025; Wyatt and Dikilitas, 2022). In this regard, our finding aligns with previous research (e.g. Karim and Nazari, 2021; Karimi and Norouzi, 2017) regarding how mentoring could expand teachers’ technical knowledge and enhance their awareness of their cognitive processes. The fresh insight here is that the teachers applied their theoretical knowledge of questioning strategies to reasoning about their classroom activities. That is, they integrated theoretical and practical knowledge at the classroom level, which helped them develop more sophisticated reasoning about their instructional questions in the debriefing sessions. This is a novel finding in the literature on both (a) questioning, as it highlights how mentoring can help teachers ask more effective questions that are grounded in theoretical knowledge; and (b) mentoring, as it shows how persistent observation-based support for teachers can make mentoring sessions more practical and tailored to their developing practices.
The semi-structured interviews with the teachers revealed that they benefited from the mentoring program in asking more dialogic questions and becoming more cognizant of their pedagogical functions. Although enhanced awareness of pedagogical strategies has been documented as a significant dimension of fruitful mentoring (Kennedy, 2005; Nguyen, 2017), our teachers emphasized that their increased awareness and new questioning approach led to their students’ enhanced enjoyment and engagement. This finding is in line with those reported by Farrell and Mom (2015) regarding the contributions of reflection on classroom practices, and by Karim and Nazari (2021) regarding how scaffolding teacher learning can help teachers become more aware of their practices. Our study extends this work by linking teachers’ enhanced awareness and improved practices to students’ enjoyment of and engagement with learning. Since effective questioning has been documented as a challenge for teachers not only in Hong Kong but also in other contexts (e.g. Hu and Duan, 2019; Hu and Li, 2017), this finding has broader relevance. It shows that teacher questioning, though a challenge in itself, can become a site of pedagogical flourishing if teachers are supported through effective professional development mentoring.
Conclusion
This study explored the contributions of classroom-based mentoring to three Hong Kong teachers’ development of effective questioning practices and the cognitions behind them. A microgenetic analysis of the teacher–mentor conversations revealed that as the teachers became more adept at identifying question types and offered increasingly sophisticated reasoning for their questioning practices, they gradually increased their talk in mentoring sessions, whereas the mentor's talk decreased. Furthermore, the teachers reported heightened awareness of teacher questioning's contributions to student learning and a shift toward dialogic questioning, which they associated with increased student engagement and enjoyment. Collectively, the findings show that the teachers were able to integrate the theoretical and practical knowledge about effective questioning acquired in the mentoring program into their classroom instruction through scaffolded reflections. These findings contribute to the scholarship on mentoring by highlighting how this form of teacher professional development can address the challenges of effective classroom questioning.
The study offers several implications for teacher education courses. As we observed, the three teachers successfully integrated theoretical knowledge about questioning, gained in a two-hour workshop, into their practice through scaffolded support from the mentor. In light of this, teacher educators could implement similar but spaced-out workshops, rather than the one-off, limited-duration workshop used in this study, to bring about more extensive classroom changes. Furthermore, teachers could engage in self-inquiry to experiment with different questioning approaches and then share their insights with mentors and colleagues, especially in online communities. Additionally, mentoring activities like those in the present study could be offered to groups of teachers to provide a time-efficient alternative to individual mentoring while fostering professional communities of practice. Future research can explore the effectiveness and efficiency of the mentoring activities recommended here. At the same time, the major limitations of the present study (i.e. the small sample size of three participant teachers in a single educational context) suggests that future researchers should collect data from a greater number of teachers in various cultural and educational contexts to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of how language teachers develop across mentoring initiatives. The ultimate goal of such mentoring initiatives is to develop teachers who can integrate the theory and practice of effective classroom questioning into their daily work.
Footnotes
Ethical considerations
This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (approval no.: HSEARS20210317008).
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a grant of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council's General Research Fund (grant number 15603521) awarded to Guangwei Hu.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.