A Case Study On English Teachers’ Application Of Questioning Techniques In Junior High Schools

Classroom discourse is an important dimension of foreign languageteaching research. As an important part of classroom discourse, teacher talkis mainly to promote students learning. Teacher talk is not only a means ofcarrying out teachers’ teaching plan, but also an important resource forstudents’ language input. Therefore, it has great influence on classroominteraction. Questioning, as a common aspect of teacher talk, takes a largeproportion in classroom teaching. By questioning, teachers can organize theclassroom teaching and can also construct an active classroom atmosphere.As the most common and important form of classroom interaction，questioning provides important resources for comprehensible language inputand opportunities for students language output. So questioning plays acrucial role in encouraging students’ thinking ability and promoting targetlanguage acquisition.For many years teachers’ questioning has been a focus of languageteaching research, and it has attracted many scholars’ attention and researchat home and abroad. No matter what is the result of different scholars’research, their purposes are all to find effective teaching method by studying teachers questioning.Based on the theory of comprehensible input, classroom interaction andoutput hypothesis, this study aims at finding out how English teachers applyquestioning techniques and providing some suggestions for improvingteachers’ questioning techniques and classroom teaching quality. This studychooses three teachers and two hundred and forty-one students as thesubjects and makes an investigation of the current situation of teachers’application of questioning techniques in such four fundamental aspects astypes of questions, techniques for choosing questions, techniques forcontrolling questioning process and techniques for evaluating students’answers. With the purpose to explore the features of junior high schoolteachers’questioning and students’view of it by analyzing the data collectedfrom classroom observation, questionnaire and interview, the writer putforward some suggestions for how to improve questioning techniques. Inthis study, the writer tries to answer the following questions:(1)What is theteachers’ ratio of asking closed and open questions, and lower-order andhigher-order questions?(2) What techniques are applied by differentteachers to choose appropriate questions?(3) How do the teachers controlthe questioning process?(4) How do the teachers evaluate students’answers?The paper is framed in six chapters.Based on the data analysis, this study reveals that English teachers injunior high school can deliver their questions in simple and easy language, but they have limited knowledge of questioning techniques. The mainfindings are as the following:(1) The teachers asked a larger number ofclosed questions and lower-order questions. The three teachers have noobvious difference in this aspect.(2)Although simplification is well used,the other three techniques for choosing questions are rarely applied.(3) Fortechniques of controlling questioning process, teachers did better innominating after questions, but used far less redirecting and probing tocontrol the questioning process.(4) They only praise their students withshort words such as “good”,“right” and “very good”, but the use ofencouraging descriptions seldom happen.With the regard of these problems, the writer puts forward somesuggestive solutions:(1) Teachers should balance the ratio of different typesof questions and try to increase the number of open and higher-orderquestions.(2) Teachers should design their key questions before class, try topropose challenging questions and questions relevant to students, and askfollow-up questions to probe students to give perfect answers.(3) In terms ofcontrolling questioning process, teachers are supposed to increase theapplication of probing and redirecting.(4) Evaluation from teachers shouldbe varied. Encouragement in the classroom should be devoted muchattention to.