A Case Study On Teacher’s Questioning In Reading Classes Of Senior High Schools

As an important means of English language teaching, teacher questioning is widely applied for bilateral exchanges between teachers and students. It is also deemed as core of effective teaching as questioning plays a vital part in arousing students’ thirst for knowledge and edify their thinking; it also helps students to master the important points and break through learning difficulties in class; in addition, questioning brings the core status of students and the guiding role of teachers into full play, thus creating interactive classroom teaching. For years, plenty of scholars have studied teacher questioning in various perspectives.Based on the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, Interaction Hypothesis and Comprehensible Output Hypothesis, this research focuses on teacher questioning behavior in senior high, and takes the six English reading classes from Nanjing No.1 Middle School as research object, and mainly analyzed the characteristics of teacher questioning, teacher’s attitude towards questioning and the differences between actual questioning behavior and teacher’s personal prediction. The author did statistics and analysis on question types, distribution of questions, question strategies, wait time and teacher feedback after classroom observation and made comparisons between the statistics result and questionnaire result afterwards.Through data analysis, the study reaches the following findings:in real English reading classes, display questions were much more than the referential ones; chorus answering and nominating were the most commonly used ways of distribution; the redirecting strategy and probing strategy were applied most frequently in classes; the wait-time was rather short, not only the post-question wait-time, but also the post-response one; positive feedback was adopted more often than negative ones: simple praise together with repetition was the most frequently used one in positive feedback while teacher correction was most constantly used in negative feedback. Conformity showed up in three aspects:question types, way of distribution and positive feedback. Inconformity was manifested in question strategies, wait-time and negative feedback. The time limit of a single class and students’language competence resulted in the inconformity between actual teaching behavior and their prediction.Teachers’ attitude is of great significance to the improvement of teacher questioning and suggestions on optimizing teacher questioning are put forward based on this research.