Study On Classroom Questioning Of English Teachers

Questioning is a very important way of classroom teaching. It is also an important approach to exchange information and communicate emotion between teachers and students. Effective questioning is beneficial to the language input and language output for students. Through questioning and feedback, teachers can stimulate the students’ interest in English learning and encourage them to think and improve their expression ability. The subject of the study is an excellent English teacher at No.18 Junior Middle School in Guiyang. The paper is based on the theory of input hypothesis, output hypothesis and communicative approach. Through classroom recording, questionnaire, and interview, the present study is intended to find out the general classroom questioning features of the excellent English teacher at No.18 junior middle school in Guiyang city and to make an analysis for the underlying causes of the characteristics.Based on classroom observation for the excellent English teacher, the researcher chose four lessons( each lesson for 45 minutes) to record and the part of questioning of each lesson is transcribed. Subsequently, the data is classified and analyzed from the following five aspects: questioning types, distribution of questioning answer, questioning strategies, wait-time, and feedback. The purpose is to provide some reference and advice for English teachers and other educational practitioners.Findings are as follows:(1) The excellent English teacher tends to raise more display questions than reference ones, but compared to the ordinary teachers, the proportion of reference questions has greatly increased.(2) The excellent teacher prefers to chorus way of answering, supplemented by nomination and volunteering. But, self-answering exist among all of them.(3) The excellent teacher does not use questioning skills frequently, while the most frequently used is the repeating skill.(4) The excellent English teacher leaves sufficient wait-time after questions.(5) The excellent teacher gives positive feedback with praise as the main. However, most of feedback is simple praise, with evaluative praise and repeating simple praise as secondary, and with other feedback forms such as asking other students to answer and offering hints to students for self-correction.Based on the findings, the following suggestions are came up with for the English teachers in junior middle school:(1)Teachers should pay attention to the proportion and distribution which display questions and referential questions take up.(2) Teachers should use chorus way to ask students to answer questions. Meanwhile, teachers should encourage students to answer questions by volunteering way, and induce students how to ask questions to the teachers and other students, and the teachers should try to avoid using self-answering.(3) Teachers should use different questioning strategies. Questioning strategies should be enriched again. Various strategies should be used, especially the strategies like probing, prompting, self-explaining etc.(4)Teachers should offer students sufficient time to think a question posed by them. Of course, wait-time should not also much too long.(5) Teachers should use positive feedback as much as possible and try to avoid using the same words to evaluate. Meanwhile, teachers should try to avoid criticizing students.When a student gives a wrong answer, the teachers should offer the student some help to correct it by himself.The study has practical and theoretical significance to some degree. On one hand, the results of the research can be regarded as examples to apply in junior middle school English teaching practice, and offer reference for English teachers to optimize their classroom questioning and improve their classroom teaching effect. On the other hand, the study explored the characteristics of questioning of the excellent English teacher and then deepen their understanding of the laws of English teaching. Therefore, it has a certain theoretical significance on foreign language teaching and research. At the same time, the teacher should improve the understanding of educational and teaching theory gradually, rather than teaching blindly.