A Case Study Of Teacher Questioning In Senior High School English Class

Classroom questioning plays an important role in teaching, and the effective questioning can promote students’rich language output, initiate students’ participation in classroom activities and facilitate the interaction between teachers and students in target language. Therefore, questioning has great significance in promoting learners’practicing of target language and critical thinking. For years, how to design questioning and how to effectively use questioning have always been the research focus of foreign language teaching at home and abroad. This research is a case study of an English teacher at a key senior high school in Yangzhou. Based on the input/output theory and IRF pattern, it investigates the teacher’s questioning design and use of questioning through class observation and interview, and tries to answer the following questions:1. How is questioning designed before class?2. How is questioning used in class?The research methods adopted in this study are classroom observation and the interview. For classroom observation, it adopts the form of video to record the teacher’s classroom teaching, which lasts45minutes. And then the recordings are later transcribed so as to be collected and analyzed on the teacher’s classroom questioning regarding types of teacher questions, ways of feedback and questioning strategies. For the interview, it is mainly a communication with the teacher about the questioning design before class and some related details of questioning use in class.This study has the following two findings:The teacher’s questioning design was made according to the teaching aims, teaching materials and the students’cognitive levels, and followed a step-by-step pattern, from general to specific.As to the use of teacher questioning in class, this study finds that:1) The teacher used four types of questions, among which display questions are used with greater frequency than referential questions, while open questions and closed ones are used almost with the same frequency.2) The teacher used four kinds of questioning strategies, among which were performed in class questioning, strategy of repeating was the most frequently used.3) The teacher used five ways of feedback, and all of her responses were given with positive feedbacks. However, they were mainly in the form of "praise" and "repeat plus praise". Moreover, not all the questions were given feedbacks, and when feedbacks are given, the language used in this class sometimes seems quite simple.In this study, the following implications of how to design and use questioning are provided for senior high school English teachers:Firstly, teachers may attach more importance to the questioning design before class. Questioning design could be made according to the teaching aims, teaching materials and students’cognitive levels and follow a step-by-step procedure. Secondly, teachers could propose different types of questions according to the teaching aims and students’ cognitive levels and keep balance between the using of display questions and referential questions. Thirdly, teachers are expected to focus on using different kinds of effective questioning strategies and appropriately reduce the use of repeating. Lastly, teachers must be aware of the importance of ways of feedback, be skilled at praising students and employing different ways of feedback reasonably.