A Study Of Teacher Questioning Strategy In English Major Intensive Reading Classes

As one of the basic teaching skills, teacher questioning is the important teachingmeans to realize high-level teacher-student interaction, cultivate students’ ability ofindependent thinking and language expression, which has been uniformly approvedby educators at home and abroad.For a long time, the researches on teachers’ classroom questioning mainlyfocused on the description of its characteristics. The content is too generallysummarized and lack of creativity and the analysis is not thorough enough. Therefore,for the reasons above, this thesis uses the intensive reading course---the mostimportant basic course for college English majors---as the research background.Based on Input Hypothesis, Output Hypothesis and Affective Filter Hypothesis, thisthesis, taking the English major teachers, freshmen and sophomores from EnglishTranslation Department and English Education Department of a certain foreignlanguages institute as its subjects, through the three effective methods of classroomobservation, questionnaires and interviews, is written to discover the present problemsof English major teachers’ questioning strategies and attempts to offer somereasonable and effective suggestions for references to help them further improve theirquestioning techniques and English teaching efficiency from the point of view ofclassroom questioning strategy to analyze the usage of it and students’ responses in amore deeper way.Through analysis, the author finds that there are two common questions existingin the classroom questioning strategies of the intensive reading teachers in this school.First of all, without paying attention to the different English foundations, learningabilities and knowledge reserve of all the students, intensive reading teachers areinclined to use the similar questioning strategies in class, like repeating andredirecting strategies. Even though the prompting and probing strategies are warmlywelcomed among students, they are not reasonably applied by teachers eventually.Secondly, after careful classroom observation, questionnaires and interviews, theauthor notices that the reasons for students’ different reactions to teachers’ questionsare various; therefore, the responses of students to teacher questioning strategies arealso full of varieties. For teachers, they should give different analyses and treatmentsfacing with different conditions. However, to save time in class and ensure the rate of the lesson, most of the teachers cannot adjust to students’ different responses. Thiskind of so-called equality cannot truly help students to improve their English learningabilities.Therefore, for intensive reading teachers, who are responsible for thefoundational teaching of English majors, they must change their teaching conceptionfirst, and then attend relevant language teaching trainings and studies actively toenhance their own theoretical knowledge to make a constant perfection in theirteaching practice. Teachers should use proper and diverse questioning strategies andtake students’ different conditions into consideration to motivate students’ enthusiasmand confidence in the frequently changed interaction between teachers and students.Based on previous researches, the present thesis displays the current situation ofteacher questioning strategies and makes a deep analysis of students’ responses inEnglish major intensive reading classes from a completely new point of view. It ishoped that the detailed data collection and analysis will provide some useful referenceto the new college English major teachers and coming scholars.Because the researching data all comes from the teachers and students of thesame foreign languages institute, the results obtained in the present study still needfurther researching to check its universality and representativeness.