A Comparative Study On Classroom Questioning Between The Novice And Expert English Teachers In Senior English Teaching

The focus of this study is in the area of English classroom questioning. As an essentialclassroom behavior, classroom questioning has been attracted great attention to in theeducational field since the establishment of classroom instructional system. The thesis istrying to find out the differences in classroom questioning between the novice Englishteachers and the expert English teachers. It mainly concentrates on the differences in threeaspects: the preparations for questioning, the questioning during the class and the teacher’sself-reflections of questioning after class. The present study takes two teachers and twoclasses they teach as the research subjects. Both the teachers come from an ordinary highschool in Shandong Province. One of them is an expert English teacher with almost ten years’teaching experience while the other is a novice teacher with two year’s teaching ages. Inaddition, the former has ever been honored the special-grade teacher and highly respected bystudents while the latter’s teaching performance is just ok. The two classes are parallel classesbecause they are almost the same in the aspects of the students’ present academic levels, theadmission scores and the teaching schedule for the two classes.The approaches adopted in this research include classroom observation, questionnaireand interview. With the three research methods, the research procedures are specificallydivided into three parts. The first part is the procedure of class observation. The present studytakes the same three reading classes of the two teachers for the classroom observations. Thesecond part is the procedure of questionnaire. During the self-study courses, the writer gaveout the questionnaires to students in the two teachers’ classes respectively. The questionnaireitself has15questions which are closely related to the research questions of the present study.The third part is the procedure of interview. The interview questions are well designed basedon the research questions of this comparative study. Through the above research procedures,the findings of this study are presented in the form of table with statistics as the evidences.Specifically, in the preparations for questioning, first, the expert teacher is more familiarwith the teaching materials than the novice teacher. Second, the former has a higher level ofknowing students. In the process of classroom questioning, six aspects are taken intoconsideration. The first one is questioning types. The expert teacher has a better balance between the referential and display questions than the novice teacher. The second one isquestioning strategies. The expert teacher uses more probing and prompting than the noviceteacher. As to the wait time, the research shows that the expert teacher has a longer wait timethan the novice teacher. The forth one is question distribution. Although both the two teachersare unable to distribute questions equally, yet the expert teacher is more equal than the noviceteacher in the question distribution. The fifth one is answering ways of classroom questioning.The results show that the expert teacher encourages the more volunteering answering than thenovice teacher. For the novice teacher, the proportion of nominating and chorus is higher thanthe expert teacher. The last one is teacher’s feedback of the classroom questioning. Both theteachers prefer positive feedbacks to negative ones. However, the number of discoursalfeedbacks from the expert teacher is larger than that from the novice teacher. In theself-reflection of classroom questioning, it is found out that the expert teacher spends moretime on reflections than the novice teacher.Such a study is of vital importance in improving English teacher’s practical questioningeffects. Through the comparative analysis of classroom questioning, this paper aims toprovide some constructive pedagogical suggestions for the novice English teachers.Specifically, first, the novice teacher should devote their energy and time to the design ofclassroom questions. Second, teachers should combine the referential questions with thedisplay questions well. Third, corresponding with the referential questions, novice teachersshould use more probing and prompting strategies to achieve the optimal teaching effects.Forth, novice teachers should lengthen the wait time properly according to the difficulty ofquestions. Fifth, novice teachers should try their best to reach the goal of equal questiondistribution. Sixth, in the questioning feedbacks, novice teachers should use more discoursalfeedbacks on students’ performances than the evaluative ones. Lastly, teachers shouldcultivate great awareness that the self-reflections are of vital importance for the teaching andindividual career development.This comparative study on the classroom questioning between the novice and expertEnglish teachers provides the above constructive suggestions for novice English teachers. It ishoped that novice teachers get some enlightenment from this thesis paper, which is also usefulfor the teachers’ career development.