Classroom Questioning And Feedback:a Comparative Study Of Urban And Rural Senior High Schools

Teacher talk has always been the focus of classroom teaching research and questioning as well as feedback are two common forms of teacher talk. At present, secondary education in China exhibits substantial differences between urban and rural areas, which renders the study of teacher talk between different areas especially significant. Through classroom observation and transcription, this paper studies teachers’ questioning and feedback in English reading classes of urban and rural senior high schools, primarily focusing on questioning types, question contents, question distributions among instruction processes, question reformulations and styles of feedback. This study finds that:(1) in reading classes of senior high schools, the number of display questions is far more numerous than that of referential questions, and rural high school teachers seldom raise referential questions; (2) in general, questions are raised more often to check reading comprehension than to assess the knowledge of English language, and rural school teachers raise slightly more questions to assess the knowledge of English language; (3) in general, most questions are raised at while-reading stage, and rural school teachers pay little attention to skimming and post-reading stage; (4) the most common reformulation strategies are prompt and simplification, and strategies such as rephrasing and decomposition are only used by urban teachers; (5) positive feedback is used more often than negative feedback. When providing positive feedback, teachers mostly use simple praise, and when providing negative feedback direct correction. The proportion of positive feedback provided by urban teachers is higher than that of rural teachers. The underlying reasons for these differences may include the differences in classroom set-ups, trainings received by teachers and students’English proficiencies.