An Investigation On Teacher Questioning In Senior Middle School English Classes

As one of the basic forms of classroom interaction, teacher questioning—student answering plays animportant role in promoting students comprehensible input and output, and the development of theirthinking abilities, etc. Students' active participation in answering teachers' questions is the premise andbasis for realizing such interaction. And teacher's questions and questioning strategies are the mostimportant factors that influence students' participation in question-answering. So, how to make studentsparticipate in question-answering actively and voluntarily is an issue which is worth the concern of themajority of the English teachers. Therefore, this study, from the perspective of teacher questioning andbased on question types and questioning strategies, aims at studying what question types and questioningstrategies the senior English teachers frequently employ and what response the students make to them inquestion-answering.This study classifies the questions into four types according to different standards, and they are displayquestion and referential question; convergent question and divergent question; yes/no question, or question,wh-question and how/why question; knowledge question, comprehension question, analysis question,synthesis question and evaluation question. The questioning strategies are classified into seven types, whichare repeating, prompting, probing, redirecting, paraphrasing, decomposition and translation. By means ofclassroom transcription and questionnaire as well as interview, the data and some other information arecollected, based on which the findings of this study are showed:(1) The frequently used question types are display question, convergent question, wh-question,knowledge question and comprehension question. The focus of questioning is on the language form; thecontents are of no interest and lack depth. In the process of questioning, teachers do not consider students'interest. Little consideration of students' real English level makes the questions difficult for students toanswer. Thus, it fails to effectively stimulate students' enthusiasm to actively participate inquestion-answering, so it is not beneficial for students' output and it doesn't facilitate the development oftheir comprehensive language competence as well as thinking abilities.(2) As for the questioning strategies, redirecting and repeating are the main types. To a certain extent, they can guide students to think and participate in question-answering. However, as teachers make nothingof students' characters and mental process, and lack other questioning strategies, the only use of repeatingdisturbs students' thinking, making them too nervous, which adds more difficulty to the question itself.Moreover, redirection to others can provide opportunities for other students' output, but brings negativeeffect on the failed students and discourages them, which affects their long-term development. In addition,in the process of redirecting, the unquestioned students no longer concentrate on the questions and theydistract their attention to somewhere else.(3) Teachers are short of professional knowledge about question types and questioning strategies. Thequestions utilized are of low-level and the questioning strategies are single and lack diversity.Finally, this paper, based on the findings, comes up with some suggestions for teachers to cultivatestudents' active participation in question-answering:(1) design different types of questions according todifferent levels of students and their interest;(2) employ diverse questioning strategies;(3) improve theirprofessional knowledge on questioning theories of question types and questioning strategies.