A Case Study On Teacher Questioning And The Cultivation Of Students’ Critical Thinking Skills In Junior High School

Critical thinking is a reasonable reflective thinking that concentrates on the decision and behavior with underlying belief.Critical thinking is viewed as a desirable education outcome and professional attribute,which has received a lot of attention from home and abroad.In second language acquisition,more and more experts,scholars and first-line teachers have realized its importance.The researcher just focuses on critical thinking skills in this study.In English classes,a proper question is not only a method to examine students’ linguistic knowledge and skills,but also encourage and challenge students to think critically.Recently,there have been many researches on teacher questioning and critical thinking,but few researches which combine teacher questioning and cultivation of critical thinking skills.Therefore,the researcher thinks there is research space.Critical thinking consists of knowledge,skills and dispositions.This study aims to explore three research questions on the basis of types of teacher questioning and cultivation of students’ critical thinking skills:(1)What’s the current situation of teachers’ understanding and viewpoints towards critical thinking?(2)What are the major types of their questions in English classes,according to Bloom’s revised taxonomy?(3)Whether these questions will help develop students’ critical thinking skills?Based on three-month classroom observation,the researcher has analyzed three English teachers in Grade nine from Bazhong Junior High School.The classroom observations focus on reading classes.The research questions are explored in depth by combing questionnaires and semi-structured interviews.Finally,through collection,collation and analysis of the data,the following research results are obtained:(1)teachers know some theories of critical thinking,but have some misunderstanding.(2)The major types of questions are remembering and understanding.Lower-cognitive questions were much more frequent than higher-cognitive questions.(3)Among the questions raised by teachers,a very small amount of questions will help cultivate students’ critical thinking skills.Therefore,the current situation of teacher questioning is not beneficial to the cultivation of students’ critical thinking skills.The researcher of this study hopes that this study can provide some reference for future researches on teacher questioning and critical thinking skills in Junior High School.