A Research On Strategies And Their Effectiveness Of Senior English Classroom Questioning

Asking questions in class has always been the most commonly used Englishteaching strategies, and one of the most influential teaching arts (Taba,1984). Studieshave shown that questioning is more frequent in English classes than in other subjects inmiddle schools.Classroom questions can both test students’ learning, cultivate students’ability to speak, and arouse their interest in learning even inspire them to work togetherin learning. Therefore, the effectiveness of classroom questioning has a direct effect onthe quality of the teacher’s education and teaching. However, in reality, the teachers havemany problems in the application of questioning strategies. For example, the questionsare not designed well, or are not at the right level of difficulty. Sometimes, the questionsare insignificant or fail to get enough feedback. The author based his research on thetheory and research of Marylou Dantonio and Paul C. Beisenherz, who proposedQuestioning for Understanding: Empowering Student Thinking(shortened as the QU:Est strategy), and tried to find out whether the strategy can help students to improvetheir English and stimulate their interest in learning English. The author presents twomain research questions before the survey:(1)Can the application of the QU: Est strategy help to improve students’ Englishperformance?(2) Can the application of the QU: Est strategy stimulate the interest of the students inlearning English?Both experiment and survey are used in this research. The research started on thefirst of September of2012, and ended on the first of January of2013in Dalate NumberOne Middle School. The subjects of the research were two parallel classes. Class2wasthe experimental group, and Class3was the control group. The QU：Est strategy was adopted in the experimental group, while conventional method was employed in thecontrol group. The two classes were taught by the same teacher. A pre-test wasadministered before the research. There was no significant difference between the twoclasses in performance. After the experiment, English test was given again. SPSS.16.0.was used for the processing of data. The results show that the experimental group madegreater progress under the guidance of the QU: Est strategies in English performance. Inthe end, the results of the questionnaire survey show that significant change occurred instudent’s attitude. Before the experiment, students’ were not highly interested in learningEnglish. After the experiment, the questionnaire results showed that the QU: Estquestioning strategies had stimulated the students’ interest in learning English, andimproved students’ motivation to learn English!This thesis is composed of five parts: Chapter One is an introduction to the originand significance of the research. Chapter Two is the literature review. A briefintroduction was made to the research of classroom questioning both at home and abroad.In addition, theoretical basis of this paper includes Krashen’s Input Hypothesis andSwain’s output hypothesis. Chapter Three is the research design. Chapter Four is theresults and discussion of the research. The fifth chapter is the conclusion. A suggestionwas made for the use of classroom questioning strategies for high school Englishteaching. Then the limitations of the research were pointed out.Implications for furtherstudy was also included in the conclusion.