An Investigation And Analysis Of Excellent English Teachers’ Classroom Questioning In Junior Middle School

Teacher questioning as an important constituent of teacher talk, is one of the main formsof interaction between teachers and students in class. More importantly, it is not only animportant source of input for students, but also an opportunity for them to produce output andreceive necessary modeling feedbacks. Effective classroom questioning is the key to conducta good English class. Therefore, teacher questioning has attracted considerable attention fromlanguage teaching researchers abroad. However, studies on teacher questioning have notemerged until1990s in China, and the researches were carried out mainly in universities, fewstudies on excellent teacher questioning in middle schools. Therefore, the present studymainly focuses on the excellent teachers’ classroom questioning in junior middle school.The present study attempts to take the videos of demonstration classes by6teachers assamples that randomly chosen from the8thNational Junior Middle School EnglishDemonstration Classes, which was held in Qingdao, in April,2010. By using qualitative andquantitative research methods, the thesis made an analysis of the characteristics of theexcellent English teachers in classroom questioning in junior middle school from five aspectssuch as question types, strategies of questioning, question distribution, wait-time andfeedback.The main findings of this study are summarized as follows：(1) In this study, excellentEnglish teachers tend to raise more display questions than referential ones, but compared tothe ordinary teachers, the proportion of referential questions has obviously increased.(2) Ofall the questioning strategies, the teachers totally used five strategies, and the most frequentlyused is the repeating skill, the least used is rephrasing.(3) As for distribution, the studentssitting in the front is the frequently being questioned, the ones in the back are the least beingquestioned, and it is relatively even for other students.(4) Excellent English teachers leavesufficient wait-time after raising a question; and the average wait-time is4.2s.(5) Positivefeedback is the main feedback form of the excellent teachers. Most of them mainly userepetition plus praise, with general praise and ask other students as secondary feedback forms,praise with comments and leading students to self-repair are the least used strategies.According to the research, the following suggestions are put forward for the English teachers in junior middle school:(1) Teachers should give as many referential questionsrelated to the students’ practical life as possible in teaching, and try to balance the proportionof display questions and referential questions.(2) Teachers should use various questioningstrategies, and avoid overusing one strategy.(3) Teachers should try to distribute questionsappropriately and evenly among students to ensure all the students have the opportunity toparticipant in the classroom activity.(4) Teachers should give enough wait-time afterquestions for students to think and organize the answer.(5) Praising and encouragementshould be adopted as the main feedback. Try not to criticize, and when a student gives awrong answer, try to offer him help for self-repair.Due to the limitation of the research condition，only6excellent teachers are chosen fromthe8thNational Junior Middle School English Demonstration Classes as samples in thepresent study. And there are no interviews and questionnaires in the study. Therefore, there isstill much room for further research regarding the issue.