An Investigation into the Oral Tests by Elementary School Teachers in Islamic Azad University's Sama Schools

The present study aimed at collecting and analyzing elementary school teacher's oral tests in Islamic Azad University’s Sama schools in zone five. For this purpose, the teaching processes of 32 teachers (20 women and 12 men) in four grades (grades two, three, four and five) in five cities were recorded by means of MP3 player. The recordings included the subjects of Persian, math, and science for ten sessions. Inverse questionnaire was used to extract the data. The results of the analysis of 960 sessions and 29520 oral questions show that: First, the average number of oral questions asked was 30.75 per session; Second, about 20 percent of the time in each class was allotted to oral questioning; Third, most of the questions were posed for checking the rate of the student's comprehension and reviewing the stated facts; Fourth, a few of the questions focused on encouraging the students to think; Fifth, questioning has no place in the teacher's lesson plans; Sixth, there is a meaningful relationship between dimensions of question, teaching grade, the kind of lesson, and the teacher's gender; Seventh, some pitfalls were observed in the process of the teachers’s questioning. These may include the followings: Addressing only the clever students, questioning and providing the answers themselves, asking the same kind of question. Since questioning is important, more attention should be paid to it in teacher training and in –service training courses.