A Case Study On The Impact Of Questioning On Students' Thinking In Junior High English Reading Classroom

As Key Competencies become a hot issue in educational field,thinking is given much priority.Most of the classroom activities in present junior high school English classes are directed at lower-order thinking,but students in junior high school are in the key period to develop their higher-order thinking like application,analysis,inference and so on.Questioning,as an integrate part of teacher talk,can directly influence students' thinking in class.But its impact on thinking has something to do with the reading texts.Teachers can find different levels of thinking in different genres of reading materials,thus reading lesson is a good carrier to activate students' higher-order thinking.This research attempts to find how questioning can influence students' thinking,particularly higher-order thinking in junior high English reading classroom.The two research questions are discussed as follows.1.What are the characteristics of classroom interaction between the teacher and students in reading lessons?2.How can questioning influence students' thinking in reading lessons?In order to solve the problems,three reading lessons taught by effective teachers are chosen because those lessons belong to the genre of a science fiction,a fable,and a fairy tale and are all related to different levels of thinking.Then,the writer transcribes the three lessons and carries out the classroom observation with the help of Flanders' Interaction Analysis System(FIAS).Later,data are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively.Brown's classification of questions and Anderson's category of thinking process are adopted to analyze teachers' questioning and students talk.Some features of each lesson are found out.The major findings of the research can be summarized as follows.First and foremost,questioning plays an important part in thinking-type classroom both in quantity and quality.Furthermore,the higher level the question type belongs to,the higher level students' thinking level can be activated.Additionally,to activate students' higher-order thinking,the choice of question types has something to do with the genre of reading materials.For example,analysis and inference questions are suitable for logical science fictions,while application and synthesis questions are appropriate for literature.Finally,teachers' way of questioning can both activate students' thinking such as asking Why-Question,and discourage their thinking like asking Yes or No questions.In the end,some pedagogical implications are put forward.Firstly,teachers are suggested to ask high-level questions and the choice of question types is dependent on the genre of the reading materials.Secondly,it is recommended for teachers to pose more follow-up questions gradually to make students realize what they are thinking step by step,particularly for logical reading materials.Thirdly,teachers should use the ways of questioning which can activate students' thinking and avoid those restricting students' thinking.