A Case Study On Senior High School English Teachers' Classroom Questioning

The New Curriculum Reform in Chinese requires that English teachers should regard students as the main participants of English teaching and pay more attention to students' development.Questioning is an important part of teaching.Classroom questioning can maintain the students' attention,arouse the students' interest,enhance the communication between teachers and students and so on.At present,the researches of the classroom questioning mainly focus on the definitions of questioning,the strategies of questioning,the classifications of questions,the functions of questioning,and the criteria of effective questioning,while the researches of the classroom questioning in the senior high school are relatively few.Moreover,comparative studies on the classroom questioning between proficient English teachers and novice English teachers in the senior high school,and the gender difference of English teachers' classroom questioning in the senior high school are still rare.Therefore,it is significant to study senior high school English teachers' classroom questioning.The thesis takes a male proficient English teacher,a female proficient English teacher,a male novice English teacher,a female novice English teacher,and chooses 200 students randomly of Taiyuan No.5 Experimental High School as research subjects.The thesis is intended to answer the following questions:1.What is the current situation of English teachers' classroom questioning in the senior high school?2.How do proficient teachers and novice teachers perform in the senior high school English teachers' classroom questioning from aspects of question types,ways of answering questions,waiting time and feedback?3.What is the gender difference in the senior high school English teachers' classroom questioning from aspects of question types,ways of answering questions,waiting time and feedback?Results from the questionnaire for 200 students chosen randomly,classroom observation and interview for 4 teachers show the following findings: First,teachers' questioning does nothave much effect on students,teachers' questions are not easily understood by all students,teachers use more display questions,teachers' questioning distribution and ways of answering questions are not reasonable,teachers' waiting time is too short,and teachers' feedback is not appropriate.Second,comparison between proficient and novice English teachers indicates that proficient English teachers use more referential questions,their waiting time is longer,they use more positive feedback,and both proficient English teachers and novice English teachers prefer to nominate students to answer questions.Third,comparison between male and female English teachers indicates that female English teachers use more display questions,their waiting time is longer,they use more positive feedback,and both male English teachers and female English teachers prefer to nominate students to answer questions.In the end,the author makes some suggestions,which are paying more attention to the quality of questions,making questions easier to understand,asking students more referential questions,questioning all students equally,encouraging students to answer questions actively,lengthening the waiting time after questioning,giving students more meaningful feedback,and making reflection after class.