An Investigation Into Teacher’s Questioning In The Teaching Of Reading In Junior Middle School

The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2017 Edition)attaches great importance to the development of students’ thinking ability,and advocate the cultivation of students’ thinking qualities which include scientific thinking,innovative thinking,and critical thinking.In other words,the cultivation of students’ high-level thinking ability in English teaching should be paid special attention to.Literature search for research in promoting the development of students’ advanced thinking ability by questioning reveals these studies mainly focus on the sharing of text and lack the support of empirical research.Therefore,this investigation selected,transcribed and analyzed 10 reading teaching videos from the 11 th session of National Junior English Basic Skills Competition(2017)so as to study the questions raised by teachers in reading classes from a cognitive perspective.Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in the cognitive domain includes six levels:knowledge,comprehension,application,analysis,synthesis and evaluation.The first three levels belong to the lower-order thinking ability,and the last three levels belong to higher-order thinking ability.In this thesis,Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives the cognitive domain has been adopted as the major theoretical support and the following questions are addressed.(1)What types of questions are designed in English reading classes?(2)What characteristics do teachers’ questioning exhibit in English reading classes examined from the cognitive perspective?After the analysis of the data,the following results are obtained.(1)The types of questions raised by the teachers are not comprehensive enough,and the distribution of the questions is not balanced.Teachers’ questions are mainly lower-order thinking questions such as knowledge questions and comprehension questions.The proportion of lower-order thinking questions to higher-order thinking questions is approximately to 9:1.(2)The characteristics of teachers’ questionings in the English reading class are summarized from three different stages.At pre-reading stage,the proportion of lower-order thinking questions and higher-order thinking reaches to 15:1.The knowledge questions mainly call for skills in memorization,description,and recognition.They are about the background or basic language knowledge of the reading material.Comprehension questions mainly call for skills in prediction,explanation,distinguishing,and summarizing.These questions are about the content of the reading material.Even if the questions are at the same cognitive level,their impact on students’ language proficiency and language output may be different.At while-reading stage,the proportion of lower-order thinking questions and higher-order thinking questions is 11:1.The teachers’ questionings can seldom promote the development of students’ high-level thinking.At this stage,teachers’ questions focus on information extraction,strategy application,and neglect the multiple thinking.Not only that,while-reading questions cannot cultivate students’ multi-thinking,and also cannot train students’ reading strategies sufficiently.At post-reading stage,the proportion of lower-order thinking questions and higher-order thinking questions change significantly.And the ratio between these two kinds of questions is close to 1:1.At this stage,the teacher’s questionings effectively promote students’ language output,and students’ thinking activities were further developed.However,teachers need to pay close attention to the handling of questions,offer students enough time to think,allow students to make mistakes,and give appropriate explanations.The findings indicate the necessity of further study in the area and raising teachers’ awareness of fostering high-order thinking ability in English classes through appropriate reading question designing.