The Skill of Questioning as a Marker of Second-Language Proficiency among Indian Engineering Learners

Abstract

Questioning is a mental process that surfaces as a communicative act which involves inquiry and subsequent construction of knowledge. In the language classroom, the capacity to frame meaningful questions is central to communicative competence, yet many learners in multilingual settings in India struggle to produce questions in English that are grammatically accurate and cognitively specific. This paper observes first-year engineering students in India, drawn from three first-language backgrounds — Telugu and Urdu/Hindi — in order to describe the syntactic structure of the questions they produce in English, to compare those structures with the corresponding forms in their first languages, and to analyse the difficulties that arise from mother-tongue interference. These questions are categorised by type according to their cognitive depth, mapped onto the proficiency descriptors of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), and attempt has been made to evolve a set of pedagogical strategies for teaching effective questioning. The paper argues that systematic training in question-formation can measurably strengthen learners' linguistic proficiency and their readiness for academic communication