A Study On Teacher Questioning Strategies In Reading Class In Senior High School

As an effective teaching method, Teacher Questioning has always been highly valued and frequently used in English teaching. It is an important approach for teacher to know how well the students comprehend and master the reading passage and to lead students to study further. It is also a form of interaction between teachers and students. Effective questioning strategies can help improve student’s reading skills and develop good reading habits. But studies on this are few.Based on the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, Comprehensible Output Hypothesis and Interaction Hypothesis, this study aims to explore the following three questions:What are the characteristics of teacher questioning in English reading class? What are the problems existing in the teacher questioning strategies? Are teacher questioning strategies in English reading class directly related to student’s English test score?The subjects involved are four senior high school English teachers who have a reading class based on the same reading article. According to the results of records, transcription, classroom observation, interviews of teachers and questionnaires of students, the main findings are summarized as following:(1) High frequency of teaeher questioning. The four teaehers asked63,58,104,47qestions separately.(2) Teaehers asked more display questions (80.9%) than referential questions (19.1%). The questions about reading are easy.(3) Indirect questions, guessing questions and referring questions are too less.(4)Teachers’ questioning language such as speed, vocabulary, syntax is appropriate to students.The mostly used adjustment strategy of teacher’s questioning language is "repeating""stop" and "simplification", while "decomposition","probing","prompting" and "redirecting" are rarely used.(5)Teachers mainly use IRF (Initiation-Response-Feedback)structure, which means teacher plays a leading part in the reading class. The students accept information passively. Divergent and creative thinking training opportunities and second language output are less.(6)The average post-response wait-time is obviously short.(7)"Nominating" is the main way of answering the question, which lead to the unfairness of answering opportunity.(8) The positive feedback is simple and ambiguous.(9)Teachers are used to helping studentst to correct the mistake of the language instead of encouraging students to correct the mistakes individually or interactively.Based on my research, some suggestions concerning questioning plan, design, control and feedback are given in this study, aiming at helping teachers in senior high school to improve the quality of questioning in class and the efficiency of teaching in English reading as well as help the students to improve their second language acquisition. According to the results of post-test, we can draw the following conclusion:Teacher questioning strategies in English reading class are directly related to student’s English test score. Appropriately adjusted, teacher questioning strategies in English reading class can effectively help students to improve their English reading ability and achieve higher grades in English test.