An Investigation Of The Classroom Questioning Of Distinguished High School Teachers

Since second language learning mainly comes from classroom teaching, teacher talk has been a hot theme in foreign language teaching and research. And questioning has a large proportion in teacher talk, but also is the most frequently used strategy in teaching. Good questioning will make the whole lesson become more effective and efficient. However, most previous study focused on teacher talk analysis, which was a broad area. There were few studies only choosing teacher questioning as research subject and paying close attention to efficiency of questioning. Especially concerning with the distinguished teachers who participated in English teaching competition,studies were much rarer. Therefore, further study needs to be done in order to complete previous study results and gives more suggestions of how to ask questions more efficiently and effectively to high school English teachers.The thesis is based on Long’s Interaction Hypothesis and Classroom Discourse Pattern Theory, aiming to solve three questions:(1) What is the frequency of valid questions and invalid questions in the teacher talk?(2) What are the characteristics of outstanding teachers’ questioning in senior high school in terms of the general types,the wait time, responding language and teacher feedback?(3) What is the frequency of questioning strategies that outstanding teachers employ in order to ensure the quality of an excellent English class?It selects six videos of distinguished high school English teachers who took part in the 6th English Teaching Competition of China as research subjects. Among these six English classes, except for the lesson type of Teacher 4 was listening, the others were comprehensive reading lessons. Classroom questioning is studied from the following six aspects: validation of questions, types of questions, responding ways,wait time, teachers’ feedback, questioning strategies and reaches the following conclusions and inspirations:Firstly, validation of questions should be taken into consideration when teachers design questions. Although all of them give efficient promotions for students to grasp new knowledge, validation questions are much more helpful to deepen students’ comprehension. Secondly, when questions are classified according to the forms, “Yes or No” questions and wh- questions are used widely. According to question contents,knowledge questions take the most proportion. In terms of degree of freedom, display questions are much more than referential questions. When questions are classifiedaccording to degree of difficulty, teachers prefer low-level questions than high-level questions. The result shows that teachers pay more attention on factual questions;however, more abstract questions will promote the creativity and independent thinking of the students. Thirdly, as for the responding forms, volunteering and nominating are two main forms, and the average wait time is 9.88 s. Fourthly, the six excellent teachers prefer positive feedback to negative one in class. Praises followed by repetition is the majority which accounts for 46.42%; for the negative feedback,asking another student to answer is the major way that teachers adopt which accounts for 48.5%. Teachers should give more positive feedback with appraisals. Lastly, there are varieties of questioning strategies, while the most frequently used strategies are repetition strategies and redirection strategies.Since the New Curriculum Standard emphasizes the importance of experiencing,discussion, cooperation and exploration, the author gives some suggestions for how to ask questions effectively and efficiently. At last, the author points out the limitation of the thesis and gives suggestions for further study on teacher questioning behavior.