Teachers' Questioning and Feedback in Afghan Classrooms: : A study of grade 4 to 6 of primary school teachers in Kabul city.

Abstract: Even today, teachers’ questioning is one of the most frequently used teaching strategies. It affects the students’ learning in various ways and may lead to development of productive and critical thinking among students. This study aims to identify the type of questions used by teachers and the kind of feedback provided to students in classroom at primary schools. The study was conducted in grade 4, 5 and 6 (30 classes in total) of ten schools in Kabul city. The schools were selected through random sampling and the data was collected via structured observation schedule. The data analysis was based on the frequency and percentage of the responses from the observation schedule. The main findings of the study are: i) most of the teachers use questioning as a teaching technique but many teachers spend little time on asking and answering questions compared to what previous researches suggest i.e. that teachers spent more than half of class time on questioning; ii) majority of the teachers frequently ask closed questions or questions that require Yes/No answers, one word response and/or answers that rely on memory; iii) the frequency of providing information about how to improve student’s response has been rather low. Overall, the results of the study confirm the findings of former research.