An Action Research On Junior High School English Teachers’Classroom Questioning

Classroom questioning is indispensible in teaching activities, which is of great significance in promoting teaching. Many scholars have done researches on classroom questioning. These researches from aboard started early and have got remarkable achievements. Based on the researches abroad, Chinese scholars have made achievements as well. However, when searching lots of related literature, the author finds that theses researches mainly focus on questioning theories, and action researches are rarely made. Therefore, a collaborative action research is carried out with a junior high school English teacher on probing the questioning strategies for optimizing the questioning skills.Based on the previous researches, a10-week action research is designed and implemented to promote Miss A’s classroom questioning skills by means of the classroom observation.10lessons are video recorded, transcribed, and analyzed from the planning for questioning, controlling of questioning, and teacher’s feedback. The subjects involved in this research are an English teacher Miss A and her32students in Class1, Grade9in Hongwen Experimental School in Guilin city. The research probes into:1) Miss A’s classroom questioning;2) the strategies promoting Miss A’s questioning;3) the achievements Miss A has made after the implementation of action strategies.The data analysis presents that:1) There are such problems existing in Miss A’s classroom questioning:most of the questions are low cognitive level questions, such as knowledge questions and comprehension questions; the questioning distribution is not balanced which shows her preference of the students seating in the right and back areas; Miss A is more likely to call individual student before putting up the question; a great majority of the questions are answered in chorus, and only a few students are willing to answer questions voluntarily; as for the feedback, Miss A prefers to show her agreements rather than praises; the application of questioning strategies are not proficient.2) The strategies for Miss A to promote the classroom questioning include the following3sections: a. planning strategies:improve the consciousness of proposing questions intentionally; prepare questions in advance; propose as many questions on the higher level of cognition as possible.b. controlling strategies:propose questions before naming the students; reduce the frequency of answering questions in chorus; balance the distribution of questions; encourage students to answer questions voluntarily; be more skillful in questioning strategies.c. evaluating strategies:give more praises to students; avoid giving any negative feedback to students, and be patient enough to do error correction.3) After the8-week action for improvement, Miss A pays much more attention to questioning; the distribution of questions is more balanced than before; more and more students are willing to answer questions voluntarily by Miss A’s encouragement; the situation of naming students before questioning does not exist anymore; Miss A tends to give more praises to students, and starts to give praise plus comment as feedback; her application of various strategies is more flexible and effective than before.According to the improvement made by Miss A, the author gives some implications for English teachers. Limitations of the present study and suggestions for the further study are elaborated in the last section of this thesis.