The Effects Of Types Of Teacher Questions In English Reading Class On Senior High School Students' Critical Thinking Skills

As the new round of curriculum reform lays great emphasis on the quality of thinking,the idea of English as a tool of thinking has been paid more and more attention.And English critical thinking plays a crucial role throughout the development of senior high school students' overall competences.Teacher questions,especially questions of higher-order thinking have influences on students' critical reading skills.Evidences have shown that teacher questions have a correlation with students' academic achievement as well as critical thinking.Higher cognitive questions and the development of students' critical thinking mainly appear in reading classes.However,current testings on critical reading skills are mainly for college students,there is a lack of research on senior high school students' critical reading skills.Therefore,it is meaningful that initiatives are taken to explore the possible effects of types of teacher questions in English reading class on senior high school students' critical thinking skills.Bloom's taxonomy divides teacher questions into six types according to their cognitive level,they are knowledge,comprehension,application,analysis,synthesis and evaluation.Questions that require only knowledge or comprehension are of low cognitive level,while questions that involve application,analysis,synthesis or evaluation are questions of critical thinking.On this foundation,research was carried out to explore the types of teacher questions the English teachers employed in their reading classes,to test students' critical reading skills as well as to find the possible effects of types of teacher questions in English reading class on senior high school students' critical thinking skills.For this purpose,qualitative and quantitative research methodology were adopted in this research,which involved three English teachers and 134 students who were in their second year of high school learning in Chengdu.Classroom observation was done to figure out types of questions the three teachers employed.WGCTA was used to test students' critical thinking skills.Excel and SPSS21.were employed to analyze the collected data.All the three teachers ask small number of questions,as to higher order questions,the results were worse.And students in the three classes did not perform well in critical thinking test.Although existing studies have shown that there is a positive correlation between teachers' higher order questions and students' critical thinking,it turned out that the types of teacher questions had little effect on English learners' critical thinking skills.Further analysis is done to explain this result.Finally,some suggestions on the teaching of English reading in senior high schools are made based on the research results.Teachers should raise the awareness of developing students' critical thinking skills through teacher questions;balance questions of different cognitive level;improve ways of testing Chinese senior high school students' critical thinking skills.Limitations and suggestions are mentioned as implications for further research.