A Scaffolding Theory-based Research On Questioning Strategies And The Applications In Junior High School English Classroom Teaching

Teachers' classroom questioning has always been one of the most common ways for conducting various teaching activities.Due to the functions of questioning,teachers are able to check students' understanding,attract their attention,maintain their concentration and develop their thinking as well.However,previous researches have shown that there are still some serious problems in it.“how to question”,“when to question” and “what to question” reflect teachers' teaching beliefs,teaching methods and teaching wisdom.Research on the application of scaffolding theory into classroom questioning makes it possible to find out the advantages and then expand widely;for its shortcomings,we can further explore and seek improving methods.Taking scaffolding theory as its theoretical foundation,this thesis aims at carrying out both a quantitative and qualitative research on junior high school English teachers' classroom questioning,in order to figure out how scaffolding-based English classroom questioning influences students' English learning and the major factors in deciding questioning strategies,hoping it can make a useful reference for their teaching in the future.Taking three junior high school English teachers and their 167 students as the participants,the research adopts classroom observation,interview and questionnaire as its research instruments,mainly focusing on analysis of question types,waiting time,teacher feedback on students' replies,and the scaffolding functions of teachers' classroom questioning.It is carried out in the major three steps: first record 30 lessons taught by the three teachers in text and audio,then randomly select six of them to transcribe into written forms;next interview the three teachers about their understanding of classroom questioning,especially on questioning strategies and application and take notes about the questions and their answers;finally hand out questionnaires to the students to get their opinions and make statistical analysis.Based on the results of analyzing the data collected from the three methods,the research finds out that the teachers tend to ask more low level questions such as knowledge and comprehension questions,give more positive feedback on students' answers,the logic behind questions is not clear,and the questions teachers asked fail to serve as scaffolds.Thus,there are two suggestions.1.English teachers should restructure the composition of question types.2.English teachers need adopt different questioning strategies according to the differences of students' ZPDs.