A Study On The Application Of "Question Chain" In English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading implies something complex,which requires students to experience,anticipate,examine,and receive information according to their background of knowledge.It will be more complex if they lack thinking ability.Using questioning strategies skillfully in English class can encourage students’ flexible and critical thinking,thus encouraging reading engagement.To facilitate students’ progress at different levels of cognition,a variety of carefully designed questions can be used to help them develop new ideas and formulate conclusions based on their existing knowledge and understanding.Question chain,as a scaffold to inspire students’ thinking involvement,which is composed of a series of interrelated,hierarchical,and logical questions.This paper intends to apply the question chain into English reading teaching and explore the effectiveness in cultivating students’ thinking involvement.The study aims to enhance students’ awareness and thinking involvement with the aid of well-designed question chains which are gained through Bloom’s Taxonomy Theory and Problem Continuum Theory.To be more specific,three research questions are to be discussed as follow: First,can question chain help students deepen their understanding of the topic of the text? Then,what effects does question chain produce on senior high school students’ English reading performance? Finally,what effects does question chain produce on senior high school students’ thinking involvement?In the research process,the author took Bloom’s Taxonomy Theory and Problem Continuum Theory as the theoretical support.Then author applied the question chain to English reading class.For evaluating the applicability of the question chain in reading teaching and the effectiveness of thinking involvement in reading teaching,100 students from class 9(experimental class)and class 15(control class)of senior high school in Nan Chong are selected as experimental participants.Questionnaires,tests,interviews are used as research instrument.After one-semester experiment,questionnaires and interview are required to verify whether question chain teaching can enhance students’ thinking involvement while they are reading,and tests are used to detect the effect of question chain on students’ understanding of the topic and reading performance.Based on the results of the thinking involvement questionnaires and tests,the following conclusions can be drawn:1)The use of question chain in English reading teaching can deepen students’ understanding of a passage.After the experiment,the accuracy of the main idea questions is much higher than the pre-experiment.2)Question chain teaching has a positive effect on the improvement of students’ reading performance,after a semester,Although the reading scores of both classes improved after a semester of study,EC shows a much greater improvement than CC.Moreover,there is a significant difference between the two classes through an independent samples t-test.3)Question chain teaching has a positive impact on the improvement of students’ thinking involvement,and an independent samples t-test on the thinking quality questionnaire finds significant differences between the two classes.Therefore,question chain that prompts recall of information,shapes understanding of an article’s topic meaning,and encourages reflection which may play an important role in learning process.