Exploring EFL Secondary School Teachers' Practical Knowledge About Classroom Questioning

With the advancement of curriculum reform,the cultivation of core competencies become a national and international hot issue.Since the enactment of English Curriculum Standard for Senor High School(2017 Version),thinking quality as one of core competencies are emphasized.For EFL teachers,how to design and implement quality questioning for deepening the learning effects and cultivating students' core competencies is an important teaching skill and pedagogy.Against this backdrop,the research chooses classroom questioning as a research topic,revealing the characteristics of teachers' practical knowledge about questioning,and its influencing factors.The research questions are:(1)What are the features of teachers' classroom questioning?(2)What are the characteristics of teachers' practical knowledge about questioning?(3)What are the influencing factors of teachers' practical knowledge about questioning?To answer the above questions,this present research adopts interpretative research paradigm with qualitative approach as the major methods.The research participants are from comparatively economically and culturally developed areas such as Suzhou,Hangzhou and Shanghai.Class observation,stimulated recall interview and semi-structured interviews complementing with narrative questionnaire and concept map are applied in order to get a comprehensive view of secondary school teachers' practical knowledge development.The discussion finally discloses different ways of teacher learning based on three teachers who are from different regions and schools.The major findings are: first of all,secondary school teachers' questioning shows mostly low-order thinking level according to Bloom's thinking hierarchy,the reason for this might be teachers' too much emphasis on students' basic language learning of vocabulary and grammar.High-order thinking questions such as evaluative questions are applied frequently only in one of the teachers' class.As for creative level of questions,they mostly appear one time in every teacher's reading class.Through interviews,the reasons for not being able to ask more high-order thinking questions are due to time limit,examination pressure,and other personal and situational factors.Furthermore,questioning design is related to class type and the difficulty level of texts.Questioning types and high-level thinking questions are rich in reading class and relatively difficult texts.Based on the analysis of thinking level movement,five forms of movements are found: low level parallel movement,high level parallel movement,rising level movement and discursive movement,each type of movement has different functions,but rising and discursive movements cater more for students' language and thinking development.In addition,quality questioning has relations with teachers' feedback,there are five ways of feedback found in this research: IR(initiate-response),IRE(initiate-response-evaluation),IRF(initiate-response-further),SR(self-response),NR(no response),among which,IRE model is mostly used by three teachers,the rest are infrequently used.Although IRF model tends to cultivate students' language and thinking ability better,the three teachers seldom used it.Secondly,three teachers' practical knowledge about questioning is very rich,and they share some common characteristics such as questioning for comprehension,for text type analysis and for writing,however the three teachers have different focus when utilizing questioning,leading to different teaching and learning effects and classroom learning atmosphere.For example,Ms.Su put much emphasis on interaction in order to avoid boredom in the class;Ms.Hang enjoys most communicating with students;Ms.Jiang's questioning mainly helps students to understand texts.Moreover,there are other findings through interview and analysis of teachers' documents of teaching plans,that three teachers' practical knowledge are highly dependent on the contexts.In comparison with routine classes,quality questioning is embodied well and sufficiently in public classes.And if the text information is more interesting and challenging,diverse thinking levels of questioning tend to be achieved better.Thirdly,based on the investigation of factors influencing three teachers' practical knowledge about questioning,the research finds that the three teachers are subject to different reasons under the influence of historical school traditions.Ms.Su is“ succession from mentor type”,meaning her practical knowledge is mostly from her mentor;Ms.Hang is “school affordance type” which denotes Hang's practical knowledge is all from her work place,namely her school;Ms.Jiang is from one of the most economically and culturally developed city—Shanghai,though her school is not a renowned school,the outside environment provides rich affordance to her,and the affordances are from different sources,plus her strong teacher agency,is a “ selfdevelopment type” teacher.This research finally discusses the characteristics of teacher learning in China,which reflected from the three cases from cultural-historical activity perspectives.It is posited that teacher practical knowledge development is closely related to teachers' expansive learning and cross-boundary learning.If the scopes of activity systems are narrow,the learning is limited.The cooperation between government,schools and community should be strengthened in the future,which could enrich learning affordances,make cross-boundary learning possible for teachers.In addition,from the ecological perspective,three teachers' teacher agency will be reduced if their career goals are not clear,their perception and application of the affordances for teacher development will be also limited.Among the three cases,Ms.Jiang has very clear career goals,her agency works actively,gaining various affordances from her living and working environment,thus getting better results,and positive development trajectory.Based on the above findings,the research proposes a questioning design frame in relation to connecting factors to promote students' thinking,some practical suggestions for classroom practice are discussed subsequently.Moreover,the contextual characteristics of practical knowledge are analyzed,which enriches the understanding about the connotations of practical knowledge.The research finally proposes a theoretical framework for teachers' multi-dimensional practical knowledge growth from the perspective of cultural-historical activity theory.Some theoretical and practical suggestions for teacher professional development in the future are also put forward.The present study has some limitations,except for the unavoidable subjectivity of qualitative study,the future may recruit more and different gender participants,extend the research length,and adopt diverse methods to conduct the research in order to gain in-depth multi-layer analysis of teacher questioning and the dynamic formation of teacher practical knowledge.