A Study On The Influence Of Teachers’ Questioning Types On Students’ Critical Thinking In Senior High School English Reading Class

Under the background of contemporary education,critical thinking has become into an important thinking ability.According to Bloom’s taxonomy educational objective theory,critical thinking is thinking at a high cognitive level,including analysis,evaluation,creation,etc.In recent years,more and more experts,scholars and front-line teachers have realized the importance of critical thinking in second language acquisition.In English reading class,proper classroom questioning can not only test students’ basic language knowledge and skills,but also promote communication between teachers and students and guide students to think critically,and different types of classroom questioning have different influences on students’ critical thinking.So far,many experts and teachers at home and abroad have conducted in-depth research on classroom questioning and critical thinking,but there are few studies on combining classroom questioning and critical thinking.The research took 51 senior high school students in Class Three,Senior Grade One and 3 English teachers from Senior Grade One of Yinchuan No.6 Middle School as the research subjects.The research was carried out by means of a questionnaire,classroom observation,interview and teaching experiment to investigate the influence of teachers’ classroom questioning types on the students’ critical thinking.There are two research questions:1.What effects do different classroom questioning types have on senior high school students’ critical thinking?2.What types of classroom questioning can improve the critical thinking of senior high school students? And why?This research conducted a questionnaire and a reading comprehension test before the teaching experiment,and the relevant data were collected,analyzed and discussed.Through the analysis and discussion of the data collected from the questionnaire and the results of the reading comprehension test before the experiment,it is found that the critical thinking of senior high school students is generally weak.Secondly,this research conducted the classroom observation on 3 English teachers.Through classroom observation,it is found that the types of classroom questioning used by teachers are mainly low-cognitive level questions that are not conducive to the development of students’ high-level thinking.In contrast,high-cognitive level questions such as referential,open-ended,and non-retrieval questions are rarely used.Because of the above situation,this research conducted a month-long English reading teaching with targeted classroom questioning.After the teaching experiment,this research conducted a post-test of reading comprehension,and selected randomly 15 students for interviews.By comparing and analyzing the reading comprehension test results before and after the experiment,this research found that the post-test scores improved,which proved that high-cognitive level classroom questioning was not only conducive to cultivating students’ critical thinking,but also to improving their English reading performance.According to the interview results,students held that compared with the previous classroom questioning,the adjusted classroom questioning type is more challenging,which can stimulate them to think and improve their reasoning,judgment,analysis and evaluation ability,thus proving that the high-cognitive level classroom questioning is indeed conducive to cultivating students’ critical thinking.This research cultivates students’ critical thinking through high-cognitive level classroom questioning and provides certain references for English teachers’ specific implementation of facilitating students’ critical thinking through classroom questioning.It is hoped that this research can inspire teachers to change their attitude toward cultivating students’ critical thinking,change the teaching mode,promote the development of students’ thinking,and improve students’ academic performance.