An Investigation Into Teacher Questioning In English Reading Classes Of A Junior High School

Reading teaching plays an extremely important role in junior high school Englishteaching. Go for it, an English textbook for junior high school students, has a reading text ineach unit from Grade8to Grade9. Students will not only accumulate some basic knowledgeof English, but also form certain skills integrated language use by reading widely.Teachers’ questioning is one of the most important ways for teachers to guide students toread and a frequently-used form of interactions between teachers and students. Questioningcan not only provide a vital source for students’ input, but also create opportunities forstudents’ output. Effective teacher questioning is helpful to stimulating the consciousness ofstudents’ participation, helping students better comprehend the English texts and cultivatingstudents the ability to solving the problem, thus improving the effect of reading teaching.Therefore, the study of teacher questioning in reading classes of junior high schools is of greatimportance for improving the quality of English reading teaching.The subjects involved are four junior high school teachers and190students fromChangchun, Jilin Province. Meanwhile, the4teachers’ reading classes are observed and theyare interviewed after their classes. Go for it is regarded as the main teaching material, and thefeatures of teacher questioning in4aspects are separately summarized and analyzedaccording to pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading stages of reading classes. The4aspects involve forms of questions, types of questions, ways of questioning and strategies ofquestioning. The present study investigates the status of teacher questioning, and tries toprovide some suggestions of effective questions in English reading classes of junior highschools in this study.The results of this study indicate that “wh-” questions are mainly used in the three stagesof English reading classes of junior high schools; teachers produce more display questionsthan referential questions, more low-level questions than high-level questions; Meanwhile,teachers use more nominating and volunteering; teachers use more strategies of promptingand paraphrasing compared with strategy of probing; The result also shows that Englishteachers of junior high schools know a little about the theoretical aspects of teacherquestioning.According to the above results, some implications are provided for teacher questioningin reading class of junior high schools, such as that teachers should read more theoreticalbooks about teacher questioning; that teachers should question properly and increase thenumber of referential questions and high-level questions; that teachers should flexibly apply ways and strategies of questioning.