A Study On Effective Teacher Questioning In Senior High School English Classes

Since ancient times,the topic of effective teacher questioning has been highly valued by scholars at home and abroad.Effective teacher questioning can arouse students' learning interest,train their logical thinking ability and promote students' output of language.Therefore,effective teacher questioning is the key to successful teaching.Foreign theoretical researches mainly focus on the art and function of teacher questioning,while domestic researches are interested in concrete parts,such as,types of questions and questioning strategies,wait-time,feedback of teacher questioning and other aspects.Despite of the large number of researches on teacher questioning in China,the breadth and depth of these researches still need to be explored.On the basis of previous researches,three English teachers and their classes in No.2 Middle School attached to Qinghai Normal University(abbreviated as No.2Middle School hereafter)are regarded as subjects.It took two months to collect the data in order to answer three research questions.(1)What are the main effective question types in senior high English classes?(2)What are the effective questioning strategies used to elicit answers in senior high English classes?(3)What are the problems existing in teacher questioning? First of all,the author makes full use of the classroom observation plus video-recording,informal interviews and questionnaire to collect data which are about the types of questions,types of teacher questioning strategies,wait-time and feedback of teacher questioning;Afterwards,the data of classroom observation plus video-recording will be transcribed.At last,the results of interviews and questionnaire will be used as supplementary material.The results showed that:(1)The number of convergent questions is much higher than that of divergent questions.The convergent questions belong to low level questions and require students to memorize basic facts,which are not beneficial to students' development of logic thinking ability.In contrast,the divergent questions are more satisfied with the criteria of effective teacher questioning and are more able to cultivate students' ability of solving problems.(2)Repeating is widely used while the more effective teacher questioning strategies,such as prompting,probing and redirecting,are not used widely.(3)The length of some teachers' wait-time is too short to train students' lateral thinking ability.(4)Positive feedback is more efficient than negative feedback in terms of stimulating students' interest in answering questions.However,in reality,no feedback is popular.