Empirical Study On Effective Questioning Strategies And English Reading Competence Of Senior Students

Questioning in teaching,with a history of more than 2000 years,is a commonly adopted teaching strategy to improve student and teacher interaction.Meanwhile reading comprehension is of great importance in English teaching and learning.Therefore,the researches on questioning strategies used in English reading class is of both academic and pedagogical meaning.Because of its significance,many researchers at home and abroad pay special attention to the relevant studies.However,there are still many problems and misunderstandings about this issue.Therefore,the present study tries to figure out what is the practical situation of questioning strategies used in English reading class of senior high school and what are the existing problems.And the ultimate goal is to find out effective questioning strategies to better facilitate students' reading competence and offer available suggestions for teachers' effective teaching.The study is proposed from four perspectives:Socratic teaching method,input hypothesis,output hypothesis and interaction hypothesis.Based on the relevant studies at home and abroad,the author raises two research questions as follows:a.What is the current situation of questioning strategies adopted in English reading class in senior high school?And what are the existing problems?b.What is the relationship between effective questioning strategies and students'reading achievement?How can effective questioning strategies(including questioning types,teacher's feedback and teacher's wait-time)be used to improve their reading ability?In the author's internship in Dongguan NO.7 Senior High School,the two parallel classes in Senior One are participated in the experiment.Each class has separately 50 students,which are taught by the same teacher.In addition,5 teachers are also involved.The author uses 3 research instruments:questionnaire,interview and test.During a 3-month observation,Firstly,100 questionnaires are handed out to the students from both Control Class 7 and Experiment Class 8 to investigate their opinions of questioning strategies applied in reading class.Secondly,5 interviews for 5 teachers to figure out their understanding of basic questioning theories.Thirdly,a test with 20 multiple choices for 5 reading texts is distributed to the 100 students after the effective questioning strategies was used in the Experiment Class.After the test,the author uses SPSS 19.0 to analyze the mean score of students in Class 8 compared with the score of pre-test and also the mean score of the Control Class.At the same time,the author chooses one reading class in Unit 4 Body Language to transcript it into several episodes according to the research questions.Based on the research,the findings are as follows:For one thing,according to the interview and questionnaire,few teachers know detailed knowledge of questioning strategies,such as the function,types,wait-time and feedback.Accordingly,more than one third of the students think there is no evident advantages of questioning on their reading competence.For another thing,based on the test,there is a positive correlation between effective questioning strategies and students' reading competence.First,when the teacher uses more open questions and referential questions,students are actively motivated in the reading class.Second,when teacher's waiting time is more regular than that in the Control Class,basically,3 to 5 seconds is insured and most students can give pleasant response.Third,teacher's positive feedback encourages students to behave bravely and confidently.In conclusion,their test scores are much higher than that of the students in the Control Class.