A Study Of Improving Critical Thinking By Classroom Questioning

Critical thinking has become an important skill with the development of social economy and increasing progress of globalization. In recent years, critical thinking has been widely mentioned in English education. According to Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, critical thinking is a kind of high-order thinking skill which includes analyzing, evaluating, creating and so forth. There are so many studies respectively research on critical thinking and classroom questioning at home and abroad,but lack of the study which combines critical thinking with classroom questioning.This paper uses some methods such as questionnaire, classroom observation,teaching experiment and test to answer the following three questions: ? How about the current situation of critical thinking of senior high school students? ? How about the use of classroom questioning in senior high school English classroom?( ⑴ types of questions; ⑵ the pattern of questioning and answering; ⑶ teacher’s feedback; ⑷ the situation of teacher encouraging students to ask question.) ? Whether classroom questioning can effectively improve the critical thinking of students or not?According to the questionnaire, test, classroom observation, the author concludes:Firstly, the present situation of critical thinking of senior high school students is pessimistic. Secondly, teacher dominates the classroom questioning, and those questions mainly focus on yes/no questions, short answer questions and display questions. This condition causes students lack of the ability of thinking actively. In terms of those conditions, the author has a teaching experiment of reading which focus on classroom questioning for one month and a half. By comparing the condition of pre-test with the post-test, prove that classroom questioning can effectively improve the critical thinking of students.