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ItemTeacher questioning practices across a sequence of consecutive mathematics lessons: a multiple-case study of junior secondary teachers in Australia and mainland China( 2017)Question asking is one of the most common strategies used by teachers in their everyday classroom instructional practice. Over recent decades, many attempts have been made to categorise teacher questions asked during classroom instruction and to report on teachers’ skilful questioning strategies. These categorisations consider the context where the questions are asked, the appropriate use of different types of questions, the learning opportunities created in the sequences of teacher-student interactions and so on. This study was designed to extend our understanding of teachers' questioning practices in classrooms through a fine-grained analysis of mathematics lessons taught by four competent junior secondary teachers from mainland China and Australia. The study demonstrates the importance of examining teaching strategies over a sequence of lessons, the power of the IRF (Initiation-Response-Follow-up) framework as a basic structure for investigating classroom interactions, and the complexity of teaching practices, made evident through the focused investigation of the ubiquitous practice of teacher questioning. Based on the IRF framework, a comprehensive coding system was developed to analyse what kinds of verbal questions were initiated by the teachers to elicit mathematical information and in what ways the teachers made use of students’ verbal contributions in order to facilitate student construction and acquisition of mathematical knowledge. In particular, a distinction was made between Q&A question pairs, IRF (single) sequences, and IRF (multiple) sequences. Classification systems were developed for question types within each interactive category. Within IRF (multiple) sequences, the categories: initiating and follow-up represented a fundamental distinction, each category having its own suite of sub-categories. For each participating teacher, a whole unit of consecutive lessons was examined (from 6 to 10 lessons per unit). Analysis of the data suggested that: (1) Across the professional practice of the four teachers, two each in mainland China and in Australia, similarities and differences in the ways in which teachers employ questioning strategies were observed. The differences regarding questioning strategies across the consecutive lessons include: (i) number/frequency of questions asked in each lesson; (ii) the proportions of questions in IRF (multiple) sequences and the proportions of the questions in Q&A question pairs and IRF (single) sequences; and, (iii) the use of subcategories for initiation questions in each lesson. And the similarities are as follows: (i) the proportion of initiation questions in IRF (multiple) sequences out of all questions in each lesson; and, (ii) the use of subcategories for follow-up questions in each lesson. The essential point suggested by the comparison of similarities and differences regarding teacher questioning practices in this study is that the Chinese teachers and Australian teachers employed questioning strategies with similar forms but with distinctly different functions. (2) Regardless of the geographical location of the classroom, teachers’ questioning strategy choice is made rationally based on such contexts as the nature of instructional tasks and the constraints facing the teachers at the time. Those constraints might involve time limit and overemphasis on procedural fluency caused by the need to prepare students for high-stakes examinations, the demands of catering to students’ individual differences, the need for coherent delivery and explanation of sophisticated mathematics and the need to elicit information about student existing understanding. Unlike the two Chinese teachers who valued the achievement of lesson goals above any other factors, both Australian teachers placed greatest emphasis equally on students’ demands and lesson content. (3) In the case of the use of the three kinds of IRF (multiple) sequences (leading, facilitating/probing, orchestrating), the nature of teacher lesson planning – collaborative and institutionalised in the case of mainland China, and individually done in the case of Australia – affects how teachers make use of questions in class. These local educational contexts pose culturally-situated challenges, even though the teacher questioning strategies that are chosen and performed may reflect rational professional decisions by all four teachers, predicated on similar pedagogical goals. Teachers’ adjustment of their questioning routines in response to competing tensions in their classroom practices provided some of the most interesting features of the research. In addition, this study also suggests that teacher professional development program designers should ensure that novice teachers are given an opportunity to observe the teaching of a sequence of lessons and to observe closely how one expert teacher’s questioning strategies are strategically employed according to the demands of the particular lesson and its place in the topic sequence. Such strategic variation of questioning practice cannot be fully or correctly understood without the examination of the teaching of consecutive lessons.