A Study On Teacher Questioning In English Classroom Of A Junior High School

Teacher questioning is an important part of teacher talk in junior high school classrooms. Effective teacher questioning is a meaningful strategy of promoting interaction between teachers and students. Teachers use questions to guide and organize students to take part in all kinds of communicative activities and provide students more chances and circumstances to exchange information or express their thoughts, which can promote language learning by communication. Students can attain the chances to know themselves better. All these require teachers to adjust their questioning behaviors in language teaching process, in order to make a great language learning environment.This study observes and analyzes teacher questioning in junior high school classrooms basing on classroom interaction theories and related researches about teacher questioning. This study aims to find out: firstly, the types and strategies of teacher questioning; Secondly, the proportion of distribution of questions; Thirdly, the relationship between teachers’ questioning behaviors and students’ language output,as well as the relationship with classroom interaction.The researcher adopts observation, audio-record, and note the interaction between teachers and students in classrooms and emphasizes the use of teacher questioning in junior high school classrooms. The study makes a conclusion of models of teacher questioning from four aspects: types of questions, strategies of questions, distribution of questions and wait time. Also, the study analyzes the the influnce of teacher questioning on classroom interaction. The researcher designs two different questionnaires for both teachers and students to investigate and analyze the use of teacher questioning and students’ needs.The results shows: among comprehension checks, clarification checks,confirmation checks, referential questions, display questions, expressive questions and rhetorical questions, referential questions and display questions are two maintypes of questions adopted. Referential questions are more than display questions. The increase of using referential questions can promote students’ language output and increase the interaction between teachers and students. The main question strategies are prompting, probing and repeating. Probing is the highest among the three strategies. The research shows that probing strategy can stimulate students’ reflection on the questions, and increase interaction effectively. In terms of the distribution of questions, most of the teachers can give equal chance to each student to answer the questions. However, the active students and high-achievers in English will get more attention from teachers. Teachers are patient enough to wait for students’ answer and give them enough time to think. To sum up, the effective use of questions in junior high school classroom has a significant influence on students’ language output and classroom interaction.In summary, the thesis intends to give inspiration and complementaries to the use of teacher questioning to further improve the teaching quality and students’ English communicative competence.