An Action Research On Student Questioning In EFL Reading Class For English Majors

In foreign language teaching, reading comprehension has always been attracting considerable attention. Research indicates that teachers basically rely on questioning to conduct their reading class. However, research also reveals that the traditional teacher questioning has many disadvantages for students' learning, some of which are inherent in the method itself according to the author. In order to get rid of the problems of teacher questioning and promote effective learning in class, the author has experimented the new approach, student questioning, in her reading class after rational reasoning and careful planning.Research on student questioning in China is at the beginning stage, and studies mainly concentrate on the theoretical introduction of western experiences. Among the few experimental ones, student questioning is taken as a complement to teacher questioning in class, which cannot fully realize the potential of student questioning, in the author's opinion. The Research makes a new move and tests on the feasibility of making student questioning the primary means of questioning method in class by investigating the effect of student questioning upon students' involvement in class and their learning achievement. The research has involved one class of freshmen students of the English Department that the author was teaching at the time (the first semester of the school year 2007-2008). After five weeks of preparing students for their new roles in class, the author finally carried out the eight-week research and collected data through tape-recording, questionnaire surveys and students' reports during the last month when the subjects were more accustomed to their new roles. The test results of the students' reading comprehension in the final examination were collected as well. Then the data are analyzed by means of the Sinclair and Coulthard model, the Allen, Frohlich and Spada's COLT schedule, the SPSS software and test analysis.Data analyses indicate that student-initiated discourses are superior to teacher-initiated discourses in many ways. Viewed externally, student-initiated discourses tend to involve more students into the same conversation and get more rounds of talk out of the same student compared with teacher-initiated discourses. Viewed internally, while teacher-initiated discourses are almost for ever of the rigid I-R-F structure, student-initiated discourses exhibit much more varied and embedded complex structures. In discourse turn-taking, student-initiated discourses display more similarities with social discourses, with Teacher and the students switching turns naturally as the conservation goes. In role shifting, students in teacher-initiated discourses are restricted to the role of a passive responder, while in student-initiated discourses they assume more varied roles. In COLT analysis, students' output in student-initiated discourses shows more features of communicativeness than that of teacher-initiated talks. Everything indicates that student-initiated talks resemble real-life conversations. It is of significant importance, as the increased authenticity of classroom talks can rouse students' enthusiasm for participation, and the increased opportunities for meaningful negotiations can benefit their acquisition. Besides, students' reports reflect an impressive range of participation per class. The questionnaire analysis shows students' general favor for the approach, and the test analysis indicates that the subject class ranks ahead in test results when compared with their counterpart students in other classes.However, the experiment also shows that the questions students raised in class are too vocabulary-oriented. Besides, when it comes to their own involvement in the questioning and answering part, some students are hesitant for different reasons.Based on the data analyses, the author comes to the following conclusions. Firstly, student questioning is feasible as a primary means of questioning in class and it is well-received by the students, which should be attributed to the autonomous nature of the method that motivates the students immensely. Secondly, student-initiated discourses are markedly superior to teacher-initiated discourses in eliciting better students' output. With regard to the Output Hypothesis and the Interactional Hypothesis, student-initiated discourses should be encouraged and promoted in class. Thirdly, the training of questioning strategy to the students is of vital importance to cultivate students' ability to raise high quality questions and guide students' attention to the learning targets. Lastly, the approach is promising in promoting reading comprehension, with all the advantages counted in the long run.The Research is limited in many aspects as well, such as the scale and methods, which could have affected the results of the practice to some extent. So as it may, the research is a pioneer trial that has harvested some insightful findings as discussed above, with which the author wishes to contribute to the development of action research and student questioning studies in China by paving way for and encouraging later experimenters.