A Comparative Study On Questioning In Elementary Comprehensive Chinese Class

Questioning is an important part of teaching.By asking questions,teachers can check students' comprehension,encourage students to participate actively in classroom interaction and provide opportunities for students to express themselves.Researches about questioning are very meaningful.They can provide some useful advice to teaching practice,as well as related training activities.A number of studies have been carried out on questioning.On the basis of the existing researches,this paper mainly focus on the comparison of questioning between the expert teachers and the novice teachers.Compared with the existing comparative studies,this study has made some improvement on the following aspects:(1)The distribution of teacher questions at different teaching stages,the subject of questioning and the authenticity of the questions have been added into the content;(2)A more detailed classification of questions is used and the use of each kind is investigated;(3)The reasons for the differences of teachers' questioning are discussed through interviews.This paper mainly compares the questioning behaviour of three novice teachers and three expert teachers.Classroom recording,corpus analysis,questionnaire and interview are the main research methods.The research questions are:(1)What are the differences and similarities between the novice teachers and the expert teachers in the questioning behaviour;(2)What are the reasons that lead to these differences;(3)Whether the expert teachers are better than the novice teacher in questioning behaviour.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The common characteristics of the six teachers' questioning include:Displayed questions are the main type of question and the proportion of the referential questions is small.All the teachers tend to ask questions to all the students but not to a certain student.The most frequently used questioning strategies are repetition,indirect prompting and further questioning.Teachers' feedback mainly focus on the form of the language and they mostly use repetition as positive feedback.The main negative feedback used by the teachers are directly corrected and interrogative negation.(2)The main differences of questioning between the novice teachers and the expert teachers are as follows:The frequency of questioning among the expert teachers is more different than the novice teachers.Most of the questions asked by the novice teachers are on the stage of words teaching,but the number of expert teachers'questions are almost the same during words teaching and text teaching.Expert teachers ask more text oriented questions than the novice teachers.The expert teachers use questioning strategies more frequently than novice teachers.When giving feedback,the novice teachers tend to show more encouragement and are more inclusive to students' errors.But expert teachers seem to be more strict with students'answers.Novice teachers use both student questioning and teacher questioning but expert teachers mainly use teacher questioning.The content of the expert teachers'questions is more closely related to the real life of students and the teaching effect of these questions is better.(3)According to the analysis of the teaching behaviour and the questionnaire,both the expert teachers and the novice teachers have their own advantages in questioning.Expert teachers are better than novice teachers in the distribution of questions in class,the use of questioning strategies and the authenticity of questions,while novice teachers are better in some aspects of giving feedback and also show more innovation than expert teachers.