High School English Reading Class Studies Teacher Questions

Based on the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, Affective filter, Interaction Hypothesis and Comprehensible Output Hypothesis, the research is carried out to figure out the general characteristics of teachers questioning in Chinese high school EFL classes including the teachers' cognition towards their questioning behaviors and the expectations of the students towards teachers' questioning. Involving analyses and discussions of the transcriptions of four teachers' corpus in the way of live recording, classroom observation and questionnaire, there are some relevant conclusions and findings are found. The type of questioning, the main way questions are answered, teachers' questioning strategy, wait-time and feedback are described. The degree of the agreement between teachers' questioning behaviors and teachers' cognition towards it and the degree of the agreement between teachers' questioning behaviors and the expectations of students towards it are explored.Results of the research show that, teachers' cognition is disagree with teachers' questioning behaviors in questioning strategy, wait-time and negative feedback, which indicates that teachers have not have accurate understanding of their questioning behaviors. This research also reveals that there are more display questions than referential questions in EFL classes, while the majority of students prefer the latter. The frequency usage of "appointed or nominated" meets the needs of the expectations of students. The most used questioning strategy is "redirecting", which is different from the students' preference towards "decomposition". The wait-time given by teachers is shorter than students' expectations. What's more, the feedback strategies of "simple approval" and "teachers' correction" are often used by teachers, while on the expectation of "self-repaired", students prefer teachers' "comment" and guidance.In view of the importance of the teachers' cognition and the expectation of students in the improvement of teachers' questioning, based on the research, some suggestions of optimization of teacher questioning are put forward.