Case Study On Questioning Of High School English Teachers In Open Classes

Teacher questioning is an important part of teachers’discourse. As an English teacher, his or her questioning possesses multiple functions, which include organizing classroom activities, involve students in thinking, proving input of the target language, eliciting output ect. Therefore, teacher questioning has a direct impact on the quality and effectiveness of teaching. So far, the related research both at home and abroad mainly centers on the types of questions, the frequency of questioning, wait-time, questioning strategies etc. There are not many studies focusing on the question itself. However, the quality of the question usually plays an important role in the process of teaching and language acquisition.The purpose of this study is to investigate teacher questioning from a new perspective, which is going back to the question itself, to analyze the questions asked by the teachers and their effects. The method of this study is that the author would observe seven opening classes both held in junior and senior high school. Being guided by the theoretical framework, the author would totally use qualitative description and analysis to investigate these questions.On the basis of the most influential theories of second language acquisition and some related theories of teachers’ discourse analysis, the author assumes that the questions designed should possess the features of authenticity, interactivity and hierarchy, which will be the theoretical framework for the analysis of teacher questioning in this thesis. By studying these questions, the author aims to answer the following questions:1. How do the questions reflect the three important features?2. How to improve the quality of the questions based on the three features?The study indicates that the questions which possess the features of authenticity, interactivity and hierarchy could be much more effective in encouraging and stimulating the students to participate in classroom activities and eliciting output, which therefore would increase the effectiveness of classroom teaching. As for authenticity, teachers should try to make a combination of the pedagogical goals and genuine emotional exchange. If the communication is set in a specific situation, the questions should be in accordance with the given situation. And the way in which the questions are designed and the language used in the questions should be in a way that the native speakers would speak and use. With regard to interactivity, the important notion of "negotiation" has been emphasized and what teachers should do to assure the interactivity feature of their questions is to make sure that the questions they ask involve the process of negotiation, and there are three important types of negotiation. They are negotiation of meaning, negotiation of structure and negotiation of content. As for the feature of hierarchy, two dimensions should be taken into consideration. One is from the perspective of teaching materials; the other is from the perspective of students. The questions should be presented in sequence according to the cognitive level and depth in meaning. And different questions are for different students.