A Study Of The Cognitive Orientation Of Senior High School English Classroom Questioning

Questioning is one of the most common techniques used by teachers. It is the crucial part of the effective classroom teaching as well. There is a low frequency of high-level questions in the present primary and secondary school classrooms. The cognitive level of classroom questioning does not get enough attention it deserved. This paper is to discuss the cognitive orientation of English classroom questioning with an attempt to point out that effective questions serve well as scaffolding for students' cognition and that an increase of teachers' high-level questions leads to the development of students' cognitive abilities.The author strongly upholds the "learner-centered" teaching concept. The final goal of our education is to cultivate life-long initiative learners instead of passive students of low abilities. Our education aims to cultivate students' cognitive abilities. Hence classroom questions should no longer be limited in the checking of mechanical memorization of the "notable knowledge". Instead, they should cater to the learners' need and pay more attention to the development of students' cognitive abilities.Questions provoke students into thinking. Questions are of different cognitive levels. According to Bloom's taxonomy (1956), questions of memorization, comprehension and application are of low cognitive level. By Long and Sato (1983) questions were classified into display questions and referential questions. The former is raised for the purpose of language practice. The answer to this question is known and obvious. In other words, display questions belong to the low cognitive level. Sure enough, we never deny the role of helping students' memorization and fluency that the low-level cognitive display questions have played, though "a highly frequent and time-consuming low-level classroom questions will definitely result in the devaluation of students' cognitive abilities and the limitation of the development of their initiative." (申继亮,李茵, 1998 )This paper has adopted different research methods such as analyzing data, giving examples, classroom observation, classroom recording and students' questionnaires. Through the research of thirty Senior English classes of Haikou No. 1 Middle School and the analysis of one hundred students' questionnaires, the author discovers that low-level questions i.e. display questions are widely and frequently used in the classrooms while there is a lack of high-level questions i.e. referential questions which are strongly believed to be useful for the communication of the target language.The causes for the tendency of low-level questions in Senior High School English classroom are not simple: the benefits from catering to the National College Entrance Examination; the students' adaptation to the teacher-centered classroom. Above all, it is a great challenge for teachers to control their classroom once a high-level referential question is asked. Thereby, it is quite necessary to help improve teachers' language proficiency and to provide them with teacher training programs of professional classroom questioning skills.