A Study On Classroom Questioning In Senior High School English Demonstration Lessons

Classroom questioning is one of the most important parts and one of the most vital teaching methods in English classroom teaching, which attracts great attention from scholars and teachers at home and abroad. Thus there are increasing researches on classroom questioning. Well-designed and properly-used questions can activate students’ thinking, stimulate their interest in learning and involve them in classroom interaction, so that the effectiveness of an English class can be improved. Senior high school period is a vital period for students to cultivate their language capacities. At the turn of the 21st century, our country initiates a new English curriculum reform. New English Curriculum requires that while students’ language proficiency is developed, the abilities to think in English and express in English should be developed at the same time. But at present, there are some problems in English classroom questioning in senior high schools. For instance, there are more display questions than referential questions in the class. Combined the requirements from New English Curriculum with the existing problems in classroom questioning, the thesis will focus on the classroom questioning in senior high school English demonstration lessons.Classroom questioning can be categorized into different levels, and the thesis will follow the classification system of the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy to categorize classroom questions. The Cognitive Process Dimension of this theory offers a scientific system for making teaching plans or designing different levels of questions. There are six cognitive levels, and based on these levels, the questioning in this thesis can be categorized into six levels:remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. Carrying out researches on classroom questioning based on the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy aims to answer the following questions:1) What are the typical examples of questions at different cognitive levels? 2) What’s the distribution of different levels of questions in those English demonstration lessons? 3) What are the common features of those senior high school English demonstration lessons? To answer the above questions, the thesis chooses the record (video) of senior high school English classes as research subject, which is all from the first prize lessons in Hubei the 9th Display and Competition of Senior High School English Model Lessons. Then watch them and analyze question and data under the guidance of the theory. According to the obtained data, the research finds that those teachers raise many questions in class, but the difference lies in the number of questions. There are more lower-cognitive level questions than higher-cognitive ones, and the quality of those questions should be improved. The questions at "understand" level are the most frequently-asked, followed by the questions at "evaluate", "remember", "analyze", "apply" and "create" levels. To make a senior high English lesson more effective, teachers should consciously ask different-leveled questions as many as possible and try to design more higher-cognitive level questions based on students’ levels and different teaching contents.