Investigation Of The Classroom Questioning Patterns Of Distinguished High School Teachers

Teacher talk is of great importance in foreign language teaching research. It functions not only as a tool of teaching, but an important source of the students'input. And it also influences the output of the students in the aspects of quality and quantity. The previous studies show that questioning takes a large proportion in teachers talk (Leven & Long, 1987) and is one of the most frequently employed teaching strategies (Freiberg & Driscoll, 1996). Also teacher questioning is a frequently employed form of interaction. Questioning plays an important role in providing input for students, creating opportunities for students to produce output in target language and promoting interactions between teachers and students and interactions between students so that the L2 acquisition and critical thinking of students can be developed. For years, class questioning has been one of the focuses in the field of language teaching research abroad and discussed by scholars from different angles (Ellis, 1994). However, the related domestic empirical researches started in the late1990s, discussing question types and their employed frequency, wait-time after questioning, feedback types and question distribution.Based on the Input Hypothesis, Interaction Hypothesis, Output Hypothesis, Classroom Discourse Pattern Theory, and theories of teacher questioning, the research is carried out to figure out the general characteristics of class questioning of Chinese distinguished English teachers of high schools in English teaching competition and to analyze the underlying cause of these features with the hope of providing feasible suggestions for the improvement of high school English teaching.The subjects of the classroom videos observation are six distinguished high school English teachers in the 6th English Teaching Competition (High School) of China, who are randomly chosen from the 12 teachers who are awarded the First Prize in the competition. Six classes (each lasts 40minutes) are observed and transcribed. The results are as follows. 1) There are more display questions than referential questions. Referential questions promote students to produce more complex sentences than display questions, which is consistent with the preview studies. Display questions produce more utterances on the level of word or phrase and on the level of simple sentences.2) The IRF pattern has the dominance of the subjects'classes on the whole. The discourse pattern of I1R1 (InRn)F and IR1F1(RnFn)are employed to some extent.3) Of all the questions, 88.9% are posed with questioning strategies. Most of the teachers preferred to employ repetition and redirection as questioning strategies.4) The post-question wait time was appropriate for the students to organize and finish their answers. As for the post-response feedback, it is appropriate for the teachers to provide in-time feedback.5) There are more positive feedbacks than negative feedbacks employed by the subjects. Simple positive feedback has the highest frequency and percentage. But the last two types can be helpful to produce more natural-conversation like productions from students and to make the class more interactional. Negative feedback is few employed by the subjects. And the employed ones are all implicit.6) The subjects preferred to pose different types of questions at different stages of a class.The Sixth English Teaching Competition (High School) of China was held under the guidance of New Standard of English. New Standard English (NSE) is a course of English for China in the twenty-first century, emphasizing the fostering of learning strategies by encouraging students to experience, practice, discuss, cooperate, and explore during the learning process. Therefore the NES is student-centered. A great deal of language activities including questioning-answering activities are advised to be designed based on the features and interests of the learners.1) The teachers should be well prepared for their questions in class according to how deep they want the answers of students to be. Display questions also play an important role in classroom foreign language teaching. This type of questions can promote students to participate interaction in classroom. Therefore, we should not just take our focus on the choosing of question types, the question of how to pose effectively types of questions should be paid much attention.2) Questions posed by teachers should be in conjunction with an increased use of various questioning strategies and ways of feedback, leading students to provide answers with more complete and complex sentences. And the interaction in class will be increased so that the language acquisition and critical thinking can be indeed developed.3) Appropriate wait-time should be provided to students after a question is posed. Sufficient post-question wait-time will ensure that the students can be well prepared for the response in the aspect of thinking and organizing. By proper post-response wait-time, in-time feedback or evaluation will be provided by teachers.4) Student questioning should be greatly encouraged. On one hand, teachers can plan to order students to design questions themselves according to different class types, on the other hand, teachers should encourage students to put forward their problems in understanding, pronunciation, listening etc,.Questioning-answering is the important form of teacher-student in-class interaction. What to ask and how to ask are questions themselves. Study on teacher questions should be set in the background of student-centered and task-based teaching principles. Question type, questioning strategy, feedback etc., should be considered comprehensively.However, due to the limitation of researching conditions of the author, the research on distinguished teacher questioning is carried out only in several aspects and the influence of these questioning features on the output of students has not been analyzed systematically. The author carries out no interview and questionnaire research. In the end of the study the author points out the research limitation and advice on the further research on classroom questioning of senior high school English teachers.