Students’ Attitude Towards Teacher’s Questioning Strategy:a Comparison Of Advanced And Under-achieved Students

Questioning is one of the most frequently used strategies in classroom teaching, and it is well studied from the teacher’s perspective, mainly focusing on descripting the characteristics of questions. However, few studies have investigated different types of students’ attitude towards questioning strategies.This study investigated two 10 grade classes taught by the same teacher. According to English test scores of the monthly exams and the mid-term exam, one of the classes performs best in the whole grade and the other worst, and they were labeled advanced class and under-achieved class respectively. With questionnaire and interview, this study investigated their attitude towards different questioning strategies from the perspectives of verbal modification, paralinguistic modification and non-verbal modification.The major findings are as follows:1) In terms of verbal modification, students from both classes prefer repeating and paraphrasing strategies to strategies like simplifying the question, reformulating questions, using students’first language or asking specified students to answer the question. Besides, the two classes showed a significant difference in the response to the strategy of reformulating questions.2) In terms of paralinguistic modification, students prefer teachers’speaking with soft tones to increasing their volume. And there is a significant difference in the response to the strategy of clearer stress.3) In terms of non-verbal modification, students like eye contact with teachers the least.