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A Case Study On Classroom Questioning Of Excellent English Teachers In Senior Middle Schools

Posted on:2012-03-05Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:H X YaoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2167330341950484Subject:Curriculum and pedagogy
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Teacher talk is very important in foreign language teaching, not only a means of teaching, but only the content of teaching. Questioning, part of teacher talk, is one of the most frequently adopted teaching strategies( Freiberg & Driscoll,1996). For years, teachers'questioning has attracted considerable attention from researchers on linguistics teaching in foreign countries. However, Studies on teachers'questioning have not emerged until in the late 1990s in China, which are involved with the following aspects, such as question type, wait-time after questioning, distribution of questions and feedbacks. And the researches were carried out mainly in universities. With comparison, studies on excellent teachers'questioning in middle schools were less. So the present study mainly focuses on the excellent teachers'classroom questioning in a high school.On the basis of the Input Hypothesis, Interaction Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis, by classroom observation and questionnaires, the present study is made to find out the general classroom questioning features of the excellent English teachers in the first senior high school in Jin Tai county and to make an analysis for the underlying causes of the characteristics .The subjects of the classroom videos observation are three excellent English teachers in the first senior high school in Jin Tai county. Three classes ( each class for 45 minutes) are observed and the part of questioning of each subject is transcribed . Subsequently, the data is classified and analyzed from the following five aspects : types of questioning, strategies of questioning, question distribution, wait-time and teachers'feedbacks. As supplements, questionnaires are investigated in the three classes of 213 students on the basis of the five aspects above .The results show that the teachers ask more display questions than referential questions in class; six types of questioning strategies have been employed in the three classes, which are probing, repeating, self-explaining, prompting, redirection and translation respectively. Among them, probing is the most frequently employed strategy and translation is the least frequently used one; the post-question wait time, which is 4.3 seconds averagely, is appropriate for the students to organize and finish their answers; in the present research, questions are distributed in chorus, by nomination and by volunteer. The predominant way to distribute questions is in chorus . Nomination is the least frequently employed way to direct questions; positive feedbacks are far more than negative feedbacks. Among positive feedback, simple feedback is the most frequently used one. And Feedback with/in extra input is the least frequently employed one.During investigation, it is found that there are defects in classroom questioning for the excellent English teachers. A number of language activities related to questioning-answering are advised to be designed on the basis of the characteristics and interests of students and the materials to be taught, which are as follows: (1) Teachers should pay attention to the proportion which display questions and referential questions take up. (2)Questioning strategies should be enriched again. Various strategies should be used, especially the strategies like probing, prompting, self-explaining etc. (3) Teachers should distribute their questions as many ways as possible. Teachers should not depend on one or two of them completely.(4)Teachers should offer students sufficient time to think a question posed by them. Of course, wait-time should not also much too long. (5)Various ways of positive feedbacks should be adopted. In addition, negative feedbacks should be adopted adequately. (6)Teachers should also adequately guide their students to raise questions .Due to the limitations of the research conditions, only a few excellent English teachers are chosen as subjects in the present study. And there aren't interviews in the study .So there is still much room for further research regarding the issue.
Keywords/Search Tags:question, excellent English teachers, senior high school
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