A Survey On The Current Situation Of Teachers’ Questioning In English Reading Classes Of Senior High School

Reading,as one of the four basic skills,is an important part of English teaching.Under the guidance of the New Curriculum Standard,the ultimate goal of reading is to cultivate students’ reading ability.Classroom questioning is a vital channel to exchange information and communicate with students.Effective questioning can not only evoke students’ interest of learning but also expand their mind and thinking so that students can be actively engaged in reading teaching.The type of questioning,the wait-time,questioning strategies,way of questioning and feedback are closely related to the effectiveness of questioning.To investigate the current situation of questioning in English reading classes of senior high school,this paper aims to answer the following questions:1.What questioning strategies are mainly adopted in English reading class?2.What are the problems in teachers’ questioning in English reading classes of senior high school?The subjects of the research are chosen from Tong Shan Senior High School in Xuzhou.In order to investigate the current situation of teachers’ questioning in English reading classes of senior high school,the questionnaire for students are designed to hand out to 220 students.Also,the interviews for teachers are carried out with the help of 6 teachers.Besides,to get more direct materials,the author randomly chooses 1 class from each grade in Tong Shan Senior High School to conduct class observation.The analysis of collected data generates the following findings:1)Teachers in senior high school mainly adopt the questioning strategies such as probing,repetition,and redirecting.They adopt different strategies when asking different types of questions.When posing questions for factual information,teachers mainly use repetition strategy.When posing questions for understanding,teachers usually adopt the probing strategy and simplification strategy.When posing questions for speculation and creativity,teachers mainly use the redirecting strategy and decomposition strategy.2)Problems exist in the different aspects of teachers’ questioning in English reading classes.The proportion of different types of questions that teachers pose in English reading classes is out of balance.Teachers employ much more questions for factual information than the questions for understanding,speculation and creativity.The wait-time that many teachers leave to students is not enough for students and they usually give students less than 3 seconds to think about the question.Teachers usually adopt positive feedback after students’ answering questions but teachers’ feedback lacks specific explanations of the question.Also,Teachers do not diversify the way of questioning and they use the way of questioning of nominating mostly commonly in English reading classes while the other ways of questioning such as chorus answering,volunteering and teacher self-answering are not frequently used.