A Comparative Study Of Classroom Questioning Between Student Teachers And Experienced Teachers Of A High School

Study on teachers’ questioning is a hot topic home and abroad. But studies inChina started much later. Until1990there were empirical studies on teachers’questioning in universties. However, there were few studies on English teachers’classroom questioning in high schools. That’s the standpoint of this study.Based on the theoretical framework of input hypothesis and social constructivism,the thesis investigates English teachers’ questioning in a high school and tries to makea comparison of their questioning behavior between student teachers and experiencedteachers.The research method of this study is classroom observation and interview. Thesubjects of the study are four English teachers in a high school attached to HunanUniversity, among whom two are student teachers in their internship and the other twoare experienced teachers with excellent teaching performance. The researcher, as astudent in her intership, attended classes of each teacher’s class. In total, she listenedto18periods of classes, but to make a balance between each teacher’ classes. Twoperiods of each teacher are analyzed. The researcher recorded each class and tookfield notes when observing the class. The thesis analyzes each teacher’s questioningfrom four aspects: types of questions, questioning strategies, wait time and feedback.Through comparison, analysis and summarization of their questioning features, thefindings are obtained as follows:(1) In terms of types of questions, both experienced teachers and studentteachers share similar preference of display questions.(2) In terms of questioning strategies, both experienced teachers and studentteacehrs prefer to employ the strategy of repeating, redirecting, and translatingwith some personal differences. But experienced teachers employ the strategy ofprompting more skillfully than student teachers.(3) In terms of wait time, experienced teachers provide longer wait time tostudents than student teachers. The average wait time given by experiencedteachers is over3seconds, a favorable time length suggested by previous researchers. In the meantime, student teachers give only about1second wait time,leaving students little time for thinking.(4) In terms of feedback, both experienced teachers and student teachers like toprovide more positive feedback to students than negative feedback. Among thepositive feedback, experienced teachers would varify their remarks and offercomments with detailed information while student teachers’ feedback is oftenquite simple.During interviews with these experienced teachers and student teachers, it isfound that the lack of teaching experiences and knowledge of students is thereason why student teachers perform weaker than experienced teachers inteaching and in classroom questioning.Through a comparison of classroom questioning between student teachers andexperienced teachers, this study is projected to provide some references toteachers especially those student teachers and novice teachers, helping themgrow.