An Investigation Into Teacher Questioning In The English Reading Class At Senior High School

Questioning, as one of the most commonly used teaching techniques and an essential part of classroom teaching, has a long history of more than2,000years, dating back to the Confucius’s heuristic questioning and Socrates’s teaching method. In recent years, scholars at home and abroad have conducted a series of studies on teachers’ questioning both the theoretical and practical aspects. Research shows, teachers spent about80%of their teaching time asking questions, and high school teachers asked as many as395questions a day on average (Stevens,1912). By questioning, teachers can guide students to participate in classroom activities, and create opportunities for them to exchange information, express their feelings, and finally promote the development of students’ language ability and thinking ability. What’s more, questioning used in the teachers-students communication as well as the students-students communication serves as the most important platform of classroom interactions.Reading class is an important element of English teaching at senior high school. Compared with other types of classes, teacher questioning in English reading class is more frequent. Therefore, in the setting of English reading class at senior high school, this study is carried out to find out about the general characteristics of classroom questioning, and to analyze the underlying problems with the hope to provide feasible suggestions for the improvement of high school English teaching.In the author’s internship in Hutubi No.l high school in Xinjiang, she chose4English teachers as the subjects. She observed their classroom questioning behaviors for3months and made recordings of these teachers when they taught the same reading class. All the audio-recordings are transcribed and analyzed based on the research questions. Meanwhile, the author interviewed the4teachers to gather more data about their true feelings of questioning. Besides, the author distributed128questionnaires to students to collect the evidence to the research questions from the students’ perspectives. The study reveals that:1) Questioning is commonly used in the classroom teaching. However, teachers prefer to ask display questions, while students prefer more referential questions.2) Teachers design questions according to Bloom’s taxonomy, but they use knowledge questions, comprehension questions, and application questions more often than analysis questions, synthesis questions and evaluation questions.3) Questioning strategy is relatively simple. Most teachers tend to use repetition and redirection as questioning strategies, and ignore the others.4) The waiting time is not enough for students to think further.5) Regarding the teachers’ feedback, there is more positive feedback than negative feedback. However, the positive feedback is simple and not concrete.Accordingly, in order to improve the teacher questioning in English reading class, the study provides some suggestions for teachers. Firstly, teachers should pay more attention to how to use different question types effectively, which can promote students’ language output and critical thinking. Secondly, teachers should focus on using different questioning strategies in a proper way. Thirdly, appropriate waiting time should be provided to students after a question is posed. Finally, diverse ways of effective feedback should be provided.