A Survey On Senior High School English Teachers’ Questioning Patterns

Classroom interaction is a teaching process. During the process, teachers guide the class,students are considered as the main body and teachers inspire students to discover and learnnew knowledge. Many domestic and foreign scholars and English educators study theimportance of classroom interaction from different angles. It can be found in the study thatclassroom questioning is an important teaching means to promote interactions betweenteachers and students. Domestic and foreign experts and scholars study the questions withdifferent focuses, which provides a valuable reference for this thesis. Therefore, the thesis isfocused on two aspects, namely the present situation of high school English classroominteraction and teachers’ questioning. And based on the Interaction Theory (Krashen’s InputHypothesis, Swain’s Output Hypothesis and Long’s Interaction Hypothesis), the authorcombines the two aspects, discussing patterns of teachers’ questioning and its influence onclassroom T-S interaction.The author uses the quantitative and qualitative research methods to collect enough datathrough classroom observation, questionnaires and interviews. Research subjects are the fourEnglish teachers in Grade Two who come from Yutian No.1Middle School in Hebei. Byanalyzing the data, the author finds that classroom interaction is mainly the interactionbetween teachers and students, and teachers’ questioning is a major means of classroom T-Sinteraction. At the same time, the collected data shows that when teachers ask questions inclasses, there exist the following phenomena:1) the frequency of display questions asked byteachers is higher than that of referential questions;2) the distribution of questions is notbalance, focusing on the whole class, the volunteers and the inferior students;3) questionmodification is various but repeating occupies the highest position;4) the length of wait-timeis not adequate;5) positive feedback is welcomed in teachers’ feedback;6) question type,distribution, modification, wait-time and feedback influence the classroom T-S interaction indifferent degrees. The results of data show that teachers’ questioning is not ideal, which is notconducive to the students’ comprehensible input and output of target language as well as theclassroom T-S interaction. Therefore, English teachers in Senior High School should attachgreat importance to the form of classroom interaction and teachers’ questioning patterns; they should adopt various forms to promote T-S interaction and improve the questioningtechniques to promote students’ participation in classroom T-S interaction.