A Study Of The Application Of "Questioning" Teaching Method To Oral English Teaching In Junior High School Under The Input Hypothesis

Oral English learning is an integral part of the second language acquisition. In previous studies, oral English teaching mainly focuses on high school students, college students, and adults, but junior high school students are less involved. Among them, researches with the framework of input hypothesis are much rarer. Aiming at this situation, the purpose of this study is to understand the current situation of teachers’ questioning in junior high school English classroom and carry on empirical research on the oral English teaching of junior high school students, taking the input hypothesis as the theoretical basis.In this paper, the study data originate from students’ questionnaires, interviews of teachers, test and classroom observation, and classroom teaching. The author understands the current situation of the questioning of junior high school English and finds the problems from the questionnaire of students and interview of six teachers. In view of the problems discovered, the author designs the effective questioning scheme and conducts a semester of teaching practice in the experimental class 2, grade 2 of a key junior high school of Changchun. Classroom questioning schemes mainly choose the following aspects: Teachers use more inferential and open-ended questions; Teachers wait for 3 to 5 seconds after the questioning or students answering; When the students cannot succeed to answer the questions, teachers should help students to express their point of view in a variety of ways; Teachers should give positive feedbacks after the students answering. The author records the questioning situation of this class before the experiment and compared the subsequent experimental results.The following conclusions are drew through the above study: Firstly, the questions teachers asked are mainly factual ones whose answers students could find on books; Secondly, the think time of students given by teachers after the questioning is insufficient; Thirdly, the evaluation of teachers on the students’ answers is less. In view of this, the author concludes the main factors of teachers’ questioning effectively influencing the students’ oral expression: the questioning design of teachers, the use of questioning type, the length of wait-time, and the evaluation of teachers on the students’ answers. The author optimizes these influencing factors one by one and applies them to teaching, finding that more than half of the students’ oral fluency has been improved significantly and the oral output length and complexity increase by the oral test. This teaching practice has proved the feasibility of questioning teaching method which takes the input hypothesis as the theoretical framework. Finally, the research results provide a new way of thinking for future oral English class. In the teaching process, teachers can tailor the corresponding questioning strategy according to the characteristics of the students themselves so that they can improve the total amount and fluency of students’ oral expression more effectively.