A Study Of The Effect Of Teachers' Questioning On Students' Reading Comprehension In College English Class

The teachers'questioning is an important part in the educational field and is considered as an interactive tool used in English class. Teachers all know that the students have to learn a foreign language through this classroom instruction, and that students may pay great attention to the information and the ideas they get from teachers'teaching in class. In the teaching process, questioning can help teachers to interact with students, improve the teaching conditions, and activate the learning atmosphere. As for students'reading comprehension, it is an indispensable part of their learning. Reading comprehension is also used as a tool to check their study. Many researchers have offered the opinions and methods in this part. This thesis has associated the teachers'questioning with students'reading comprehension ability, so as to justify that the former could help the students have a better understanding of their reading materials, enable them to read effectively, and improve their reading ability at the same time.Studies of teacher talk date from 1970s. Most studies related to teachers'questioning focus on the quantity of questions, types of questions, wait time, questioning strategies and functions, etc. Based on the theories of Krashen's Input Hypothesis, Swain's Output Hypothesis, and Constructivism theory, this research is designed to discover the relationship between teachers'questioning and students'reading comprehension. The subjects of the study are students of two classes in a polytechnic university. For one class, traditional teaching methods and a few questions were used; the other class is the experimental class, whose teacher used different questioning strategies and designed many effective questions. After a period of teaching, a test was used to check their learning results. As a measure of supplement, questionnaires and interview were also used to help explain the results.This thesis consists of five chapters. In Chapter One, a general idea about the study is introduced, concerning the research background, the purpose and the significance of the study, as well as the whole organization of the thesis. Chapter Two is the literature review. The theories that are used to support the research are presented in this part. Besides, some theories about the teachers'questioning are also introduced, including the definition and classification of the questions, the strategies that teachers use in the class teaching, the wait time given by teachers, and the effects of such measures on students'reading comprehension. Some other factors that influence students'reading comprehension are mentioned too. Chapter Three is the research design, which covers the process of the whole study, the subjects chosen to participate in the research, and the instruments to be used for the data collection and analysis. Chapter Four is the main part of the thesis, the data analysis section. The data collected from the test and the questionnaires are analyzed in details. According to the analysis, findings are reached in this part. The last chapter is conclusion, which concludes the findings of the whole thesis and presents the limitation of the thesis.The result proves that the experimental class and control class have significantly different results. Therefore, the conclusion could be reached that effective teachers'questioning could help to improve students'reading comprehension ability.The study is a small one, and students'learning abilities are different from each other, so maybe it is not adaptable to all of the students. But the results obtained from the experiment are expected to help teachers raise questions more effectively, and to help students to improve their reading comprehension.