A Comparative Study On Classroom Questioning Of Senior High English Teachers With Different Years In Reading Class

As an effective teaching method,teaching questioning has always been highly valued and frequently used in English teaching.Teacher questioning has played an important part in teachers' organization of teaching and students' language acquisition(Nunan,1990).So large quantities of researches have been done on questioning in class,including question types,wait time,directing of questions,teachers' feedback,questioning skill,all of which belong to questioning strategies(Orstein,1995).Among the researches,few focus on a certain type of class and not many conduct a comparative research of novice and expert teachers.Therefore,the thesis will explore how the novice teachers and expert teachers use questioning strategies and try to focus on the differences of the two groups in using questioning strategies,hoping to be a complement of the previous researches and bring forward some improvement measures of questioning for senior high school teachers,especially novice teachers.The methodologies of classroom observation,questionnaire survey as well as interview were seriously taken in the study.By observing and recording six teachers'eighteen classes in a senior high school,which locates in Wenzhou,this thesis tries to find out the characteristics and problems of questioning strategies in reading classes among novice teachers and expert teachers.In order to know the daily questioning conditions in reading classes,this paper asks students to do the questionnaire.By interviewing the six teachers,the author tries to explore the reasons of the questioning strategies they take.According to the study,the novice teachers and expert teachers share a lot in common in wait time and distribution of questions.They can wait for enough long before they ask students to answer;the students almost have the same chance in answering questions;after students' answering,teachers can give positive feedback timely.But comparatively,expert teachers are capable of a wider range of questioning skills and are better at combining different questioning skills,while the main technique of novice teachers is repetition.In addition,the question types of expert teachers are more balanced than those of novice teachers'.Yet some problems should be put forward:the question type is still imbalanced to a large extent,for teachers pay more attention on display questions;the repetition skill is too frequently used by novice teachers and this has interrupted students' thinking to some extent;the teachers tend to use collective questioning and students do not give active performance when answering the individual questions and raising questions.Meanwhile,these teachers use too less praise as feedback.Based on my research,some suggestions concerning question categories and the frequency of questioning skills,the strategies of answering questions and feedback are provided in this study,aiming to aid teachers in senior high school to improve the quality and the efficiency of questioning in reading class.