| 21st Century is a thoroughly digital age and English plays an important role in cultural exchange and trade, information and technology transition, and the sharing of resources and education in the world. The aim of learning any language is to master four abilities i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among the four abilities, reading is more particularly important as it provides basis and material guarantee to further development of the other abilities. According to the new Senior High English Curriculum Standards (Trial Edition), the cultivation of reading ability is an important part of English teaching in senior high schools. In English reading classes, in order to activate students and improve their communicative ability teachers always design questions. Therefore, it seems that much attention should be paid to the proper question design.However, at present when teachers design questions in reading classes, there exist some improper phenomena such as inaccurate comprehension of materials, insufficient process of the information, irrelevant expanding topic to the chosen materials, neglect of characteristics of different types of articles, etc.This paper, in the first chapter, introduces the background, importance and aim of this study. It is well known that nowadays English plays an important role in the world, and reading is very important as it provides a basis and material guarantee to further development the other three abilities. At the same time, according to the new Senior High English Curriculum Standards (Trial Edition), teaching of English reading asks teachers to pay much attention to improve students’reading ability. As reading classes take up a large percentage in English teaching and teachers always design questions in reading classes in order to help students understand the texts and improve their reading ability. Thus much attention should be paid to the question design. The second chapter, literature review, is mainly about the history of the research on question design and the latest research home and abroad as well as the limitation of the previous researches. Chapter Three is mainly about problems of the questions found in reading classes. During the past two months of internship, the author has collected many pieces of question design from different English teachers of different schools. After analyzing them, the author finds that although some teachers design proper questions, yet there exist two main problems, i.e. neglect of different types of questions and insufficient consideration of article types. In the fourth part the author records six reading classes taught by two teachers, one standing for those who design proper questions while the other for those whose question design needs improving. The questions and students’corresponding responses in each reading class are recorded on the basis of cognitive theory and discourse analysis. In the fifth part, the author discusses and analyzes the observation deeply and offers suggestions that teachers should follow when designing questions in reading classes. Last, the author draws a conclusion that when teachers design questions in reading classes the consideration of different types of questions, the ratio each type of questions takes up and characteristics of different types of articles can be a great help. |
