A Comparative Study Of Teacher Questioning Between Novice And Experienced Senior High School English Teachers

This comparative study aims to study teacher questioning in EFL classes between experienced and novice teachers.Based on constructivism theory and socio-cultural theory,this study investigated students' attitudes and expectations towards teacher questioning in a cognitive level,differences and similarities of teacher questioning between experienced and novice teachers in EFL classes in a practical level and teachers' perceptions of their questioning in teachers' cognitive level.Four English teachers in a senior high school,including two experienced teachers and two novice teachers in Grade Two,volunteered to participate in this study with 193 students in the four classes they were teaching in this semester.The research methods are qualitative and quantitative study adopting the instruments of questionnaire,classroom observation and interview.The procedures of this study are divided into three stages: firstly,193 students completed a questionnaire about their attitudes towards teacher questioning.Secondly,classroom observation activities were conducted in the four teachers' English reading classes.Thirdly,the four teachers were interviewed individually to study their perceptions of teacher questioning.Research findings of this study are concluded as follows: 1.Experienced teachers are more familiar with learning materials than novice teachers.Experienced teachers attach more importance to students' needs while novice teachers mainly focus on whether they can achieve their teaching goals or not.2.Experienced teachers pose questions more frequently and they can balance display and referential questions better.3.Both of them can adopt various questioning strategies while experienced teachers using more promoting,probing and rephrasing than novice teachers.4.Both of them can modify their wait time according to different question types but experienced teachers give longer wait time than novice teachers do.5.Experienced teachers preferpositive feedback with praise and concrete words while novice teachers prefer negative feedback with self or peer correctness or simple positive feedback.6.Experienced teachers are superior to novice teachers in terms of communicating with students about their difficulties in answering questions while novice teachers spend more time reflecting themselves.This study contributes to improving teacher questioning effects and teaching quality of novice teachers.It is anticipated that novice teachers could gain some enlightenment from findings of this study.