The Study Of Outstanding Teacher Questioning In Reading Class Of Senior High School

Teacher talk can not only function as a tool of teaching, but an important source of students'input. Questioning, as a main element of teacher talk, is one of the most frequently employed teaching strategies as well as the form of interactions between teachers and students. 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 and students. As a result, the second language acquisition and critical thinking can be cultivated. For years, classroom questioning has been one of the focuses in the field of language teaching abroad and been discussed by scholars from different angles. However, the related domestic empirical researches started in the late 1990s and focus on the relationships between questioning methods and student achievements.In order to figure out the general characteristics of class questioning of outstanding high school English teacher, the thesis is based on the Input Hypothesis, Interaction Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis. The subjects involved are six outstanding high school English teachers who are randomly chosen from the 12 teachers participating in the English Teaching Competition (High School) of Jiangsu Province in 2005. The six teachers'teaching processes are video-recorded and the recorded materials are transcribed into written records which can be used for analysis. The findings are summarized as follows:1) There are more display questions than referential questions. Referential questions promote students to produce more complex sentences than display questions, while display questions produce more utterances on the level of word/phrase level and simple- sentence level.2) The average post-question wait-time is 2.2seconds, less than 3 seconds, but students in the competition still can think over the questions and give successful answers.3) Of all the questions,81.49% are modified with questioning strategies and the most frequently employed strategy is repetition.4) The six teachers use the different forms of questioning flexibly to encourage students to participate in the class, so volunteering and chorus-answering are the first two choices for students.5) The six teachers have a preference for positive feedback and they mostly choose the right way to correct students'errors.The findings of the study provide us with some useful insights into EFL teaching. The pedagogical implications are given in the following aspects:1) Improve questioning techniques and employ questioning strategies flexibly2) Emphasize and encourage students'questioning to increase two-way communications in the classroom.3) Create "student-centered" classroom and change teacher's roles to meet students' needs.4) Give proper feedback on students'performance and correct students'errors appropriately to create a relaxed environment for students.