A Research On Teachers’ Questioning In English Reading Class Of Senior Grade One:a Case Study

In the process of teaching English reading, teachers can check the students’ comprehending degree of the text by asking questions. Based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Swain’s Output Hypothesis and Long’s Interaction Hypothesis, this paper is intended to study teachers’ questioning in English reading class of senior grade one, by means of observing common town senior high school, transcribing the recording, applying questionnaire and interviewing the teachers and students. In order to make the English teachers improve the way of asking questions and raise the quality of teaching, four aspects have to be considered: the classification of questions that teachers ask; the way questions are answered; the teachers’ code-switching between English and Chinese and the quantity of teachers talk and students talk during the process of questioning and answer.It can be seen in this study that there exists four problems in the reading class questioning, which are disadvantageous to the students’ output. 1) The teacher asks more display questions(97%) than referential questions(3%); 2)the teacher inclines to apply the chorus way than other ways; 3)the teacher uses English less than Chinese; 4) the teacher talks more than students.Having found these problems, the author of the present paper offers the following suggestions: 1) English teachers should consciously increase the number of referential questions and decrease the number of display questions in the light of the teaching aims; 2) teachers should decrease the times of choral responding and teacher self-answering, and they should encourage students to answer the questions voluntarily; 3) teachers should spend more time on their own development, and try to speak more English when asking questions and making comments; 4) teachers should let students have more opportunities to speak English, and altering the teacher-dominated situation in class. This study, as can be inferred form above, is helpful for English teachers to improve their teaching by optimizing the quality of questioning in the reading class.The study still has some deficiencies. For example, the number of samples(that is the respondents and interviewees) is limited, so the conclusion is not necessarily universal. The means of recording is limited. The author only uses the recorder, and doesn’t use video. So many factors are missing. Therefore these flaws are expected to be made up in the future research.