13th International Congress on Mathematical Education Hamburg, 24-31 July 2016 1 - 1 A TYPOLOGY OF QUESTIONS BY INSTRUCTIONAL FUNCTION Esther Enright, Lauren Hickman, and Deborah Ball University of Michigan – Ann Arbor Questions and questioning practices are central to teaching, yet we do not have a common professional language to talk about them in teacher preparation and professional learning. This study examined TIMSS video records of practice from three countries looking for patterns in question content and teacher and student interaction to determine the function questions serve in instruction. We found common patterns in function that we used to create a beginning typology, yet observed meaningful differences across countries in how the questions were leveraged in teaching. INTRODUCTION Although posing questions remains one of the most common teaching moves in K-12 instruction, we lack understanding of their function in instruction. We also lack a lexicon for naming and distinguishing specific question types. These gaps are consequential for both teaching and teacher preparation. Questions are utilized in everyday language, but in professional work such as counseling, law, and teaching, questions are framed using specialized approaches towards specific aims. We refer to these specialized approaches used within professions as “questioning practices,” understood as a set of common, coordinated activities enacted by individuals within a profession giving those activities specialized meaning (Lampert, 2010). For example, physicians are trained to pose particular questions in deliberate ways in order to obtain medically relevant information about patients’ histories. As a professional community, they share a common practice and a common language of questions used to advance important functions in diagnostics and treatment. Likewise, teachers use questions and questioning practices (QQP) toward specialized functions in instruction, but the teaching profession does not have a well-developed language for those questions. Examining teaching cross-nationally, educational researchers disagree on whether there are common national patterns of teaching (Givvin et al., 2005). Some argue in favor of the existence of an internationally shared script for teaching as a result of a common global narrative of the school (e.g., Le Tendre et al., 2001), whereas others claim that local culture shapes teaching practice (e.g., Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). This research on questioning practice challenges this dichotomy pitting the national cultural perspective against a global cultural dynamic perspective. We argue that teaching is influenced by both the global and local in the case of QQP. We found that teachers across national contexts use similar types of questions in their mathematics instruction, yet they organize and pose them in different patterns even working on a similar mathematical task. This paper extends the work of Enright and Ball (2013) in developing an instructionally grounded typology of QQP. First, we distinguish the concepts of pedagogical purpose and pedagogical function to make a case for why pedagogical function is a more stable and accessible construct to use as a basis for a typology of QQP. Second, we examine QQP across three national contexts, comparing QQP characteristics. Third, we name several types of questions and show how teachers across the countries use those questions types in common questioning practices.