A Case Study On English Teachers' Questioning In Senior High Schools

Classroom questioning is one of the most important way in language teaching as well as an important link to promote communication and interaction between teachers and students.Proper and effective classroom questioning also has a significant influence on how to guide students to be an autonomous learner and achieving the teaching goals.The quality and way of questioning in English classes have a direct effect on students' language input and output.How to improve the effectiveness of classroom questioning and ensure the quality of English teaching is always among the top concerns of scholars.Eight English teachers and eight English classes from a senior high in Nanchang were chosen as the source of analysis and these teachers and eight students serve as the interviewee in this study.Classroom observation and personal interview were used to analyze the types of classroom questioning,the wait-time and teachers' feedback in small-class of this senior high.In order to investigate students' expectation of classroom questioning,eight students were chosen to collect more information.And this study also aims to analyze three questions as following:(1)What's the distribution of teachers' use of high-level questions(analyzing,evaluating and creating)and low-level ones(remembering,understanding and applying)in small-sized classroom teaching in senior high school?(2)How long is the wait time for English teacher after questioning in small-sized classroom teaching in senior high school?(3)In what ways do teachers give feedback to students after questioning in small-class teaching in high school?Based on the data collected from classroom observation and interview,the results are as follows:1.The amount of low-level questions is far more than the number of high-level questions.eight English teachers in this study asked questions concerning remembering and understanding while they seldom raised applying questions,which helps to guide students to apply their previous knowledge into a real situation,and evaluating,creating questions which are beneficial to foster their higher-level thinking ability.2.Most of these eight chosen English teachers have a proper wait-time in their class.The percentage of wait-time between 3 seconds to 5 seconds accounts for48.39% which takes up the highest proposition.And the wait-time less than 3 seconds account for 29.03% which ranks in the second place.3.A majority of positive feedbacks were provided in these eight classes,especially for the feedback with explanation in detail and repetitions and simple feedback.Although some students performed badly,teachers tend to praise students for their active response.However,most positive feedbacks still belong to simple and mechanical ones.