| With the development of Curriculum Reform of Elementary Education, effective classroom interaction has become the focus. It has been revealed that questioning is the most frequently-used strategy in the classroom interaction. On the one hand, teacher questioning provides a great source for students’ input. On the other hand, it can create opportunities for students to produce output, increase students’ interests and promote the interaction between teachers and students. As one of the four basic parts of English teaching and learning, reading plays an important role in English teaching, it provides certain kinds of input and opportunities to produce output. Therefore, the research of questioning in reading classes of junior high schools is necessary for improving the effectiveness of English reading teaching.Therefore, a 13-week action research was designed and carried out to improve 3 teachers’ (T1, T2, T3) classroom questioning skills. Among all the observed classes,9 classes were video recorded, transcribed and analyzed. The subjects involved were 1 EFL teacher of Grade 7 and 2 EFL teachers of Grade 8 and 124 students from their classes. Go for it was regarded as the main teaching material. Video recording, questionnaire and interview were the research instruments. Firstly, the 3 teachers’ lessons were video-recorded and transcribed objectively, and the features of their questioning were separately summarized and analyzed from the following aspects: question types, questioning distribution, coverage of the students answering questions, teachers’ feedback, wait-time and questioning strategies. Based on the previous research, a 13-week action research was designed and carried out to find an effective way to improve three teachers’skills of questioning.The research probes into:1) the three teachers’ situation of questioning at the beginning of the experiment; 2) the changes that can be perceived after the intervention of questioning strategies; 3) the improvement T1, T2 and T3 have made after the implementation of the action research.The data analysis of the pre-observation presented that:all of the teachers asked much more display questions than referential questions; the questioning distribution was not balanced which shows the teachers’different preference; a lot of questions were answered in chorus and the phenomenon of teacher self-answering also existed; a few students would like to answer questions voluntarily; the teachers’ wait-time was not sufficient; the teachers used simple feedback like agreements and simple praise more than specific feedback with comments.Therefore, the relevant strategies were used to promote the teachers’questioning skills, which were from the perspective of planning, controlling and evaluating. From the data of the post-observation carried in the 13th week, all of the three teachers asked more referential questions than before; the distribution of questions was more balanced than before; more students answered questions voluntarily; teachers tended to give more comments to students as feedback; the wait-time was a little longer than before and the teachers could apply strategies of questioning more flexibly. Therefore, it’ll enrich questioning researches and set a good example for teachers in optimizing reading classroom questioning behavior. Accordingly, it will also help students to think deeply and increase the interaction between teachers and students and promote the professional development of English teachers in junior high school. |
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