The Effect Of Teacher Questioning On High School Students’ English Oral Output

Teacher questioning is an interactive mode which is widely used in the classroom. Teachers can increase students’ participation by asking questions in class, thereby improving students’ oral output capability. Teacher questioning has aroused much attention of researchers, but far less of students’ spoken output. Speaking output is affected by many factors, and the teacher questioning is one of the major external factors. The purpose of this paper is to understand the high school English classroom teacher questioning the status quo and seek to improve the high school English teacher questioning for the fact that it will affect the students’ oral output.On the basis of Input Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis theory, this paper involves questionnaires, interviews, classroom observation and teaching experimental research methods and their impact on students’ oral output. Through a total of 386 questionnaires, and 4 English teachers were invited in interviews, the author has learned status quo of high school English teacher questioning. Based on the problems found in the investigation, the effective questioning plan has been designed, and verified teaching practice has been conducted. The author randomly selected two classes in grade 11 as subjects, i.e., the experimental class, and another class as the controlled class. During the teaching experiment, teachers use more reasoning questions and open-ended questions in the experimental class. Teachers usually wait for answers after 3-5 seconds. When students failed to answer questions, the teacher tried to give the positive feedback or correct the feedback. In the control class, the teachers just followed the routine work and did not give the students any feedback.Through the above study, we can find that teachers just pay attention to his/her own questions but pay nearly no attention to students oral output in the experiment. Second, there are a lot of problems in the questions themselves. For example, the type of the questions in class is so uniformed that students easily lose interests; or students do not have enough time to answer questions in the classroom. What’s more teachers do not pay much attention to the questioning strategies. The range of the questioning is not well-controlled. In addition, teachers’ feedback after the students’ answer is too simple.The paper suggests that improving teachers’ questions can improve students’ oral output. We can use open questions to increase students’ oral output, adapt questioning strategies which enable students to improve the quality of the answers, and to give students appropriate waiting time to let them answer effectively. After students’ feedback, teachers should give positive feedback, because that can trigger students’ further output feedback.Finally, this paper presents practical suggestions as to how to change teachers’ questioning in class, hoping that it could bring some help to high school English teachers. Finally, this paper presents practical suggestions that could be of some help to the actual teaching.