An Investigation Into Teacher Questioning In Reading Classes Of Senior High Schools

Questioning, as one of the most commonly used teaching techniques, has a long history. It could date back to Confucius’s heuristic questioning and Socrates’method of kindling the original flames in a man more than2,000years ago. Research of recent years also shows that questioning accounts for80percent of classroom talk, and it has already been the main form of interaction between the teacher and the students. Teachers apply questioning as an approach to motivate students’learning interest, provide input, deliver and share information and at the same time, check and evaluate students’learning. On the other hand, students in our country are familiar with teacher questioning as a popular teaching method. Since questioning can be an important source of students’language input, and it also provides more opportunities for students to utter more language output, to promote more communication for information. Therefore, the types, the ways of teacher questioning and how teachers respond to students will all have an effect on the effectiveness of a lesson.As one of the four basic parts of English teaching and learning, reading plays an important role in English teaching, it provides certain kinds of input and opportunities to produce output. According to the demand of the New Curriculum Standard, the ultimate goal of teaching reading is to help develop students’comprehension ability. Through reading, students can get much information and improve their language proficiency as well. In the long run, students will develop a better understanding and can produce English effectively. In addition, questioning is just like a bridge which can lead students to comprehend the reading material, to negotiate meaning for understanding, so how to ask good questions in a reading class, and how teachers apply the questioning strategies are questions worth studying.Based on previous research on questioning, the author investigated carefully into videos of two English reading classes with the title A Master of Non-verbal Humor of unit3, student’s book4, which are selected from Young Teachers’Teaching Competition of Qujiang No.l Middle School, and summarized some common features in reading classes of senior high schools:ⅰ. There are more display questions than referential questions, and they seem to be too simple; ⅱ. Most of the questions are text-based and students just answer them passively; ⅲ. Few students ask questions in class, and it is always teachers who take charge of questioning; ⅳ. It lacks interaction between the teacher and students; ⅴ. Teachers give simple feedback towards student response, which has no use stimulating students’ learning interests, and can’t help students to expand their thoughts. In order to make a deeper research into teachers’ behavior of questioning, the author also did an interview with questions concerning mainly the following aspects: How much the teachers know about classroom questioning; how they think about it; and how they act in their teaching.Finally, the author puts forward some specific suggestions on classroom questioning, and strategies for question planning, designing, controlling and evaluating are also proposed, hoping young teachers can design more communicative and thought-provoking questions and encourage students to raise their own questions. In the long run, the author hope that teachers can make questioning as an effective form of interaction so as to improve the quality of English reading classes.