A Comparative Study Of English Classroom Questioning Between The Expert And Novice Teachers In Senior High School

Among all the studies concerning class teaching,classroom questioning is considered as the skill widely applied in classroom teaching.A teacher is the demonstrator of the target language,whose quality of discourse can exert a direct influence on the organization of classroom language use,the success or failure of classroom teaching and students' mastery of the target language.This comparative study investigates classroom questioning of high school English teachers.Through the analysis of questioning types,methods,strategy,and wait-time,the thesis places its focus on sixteen English classes delivered by six teachers in two high middle schools in Nanchang City,Jiangxi Province.The study has an in-depth observation on the current situation of teachers' questioning,and the differences between novice teachers and expert teachers on implementation of questions,aiming to provide some references and advice for novice teachers and other educational practitioners.Through classroom recording and interview,the study comes to the following conclusions: there exist obvious differences between novice teachers and expert teachers in terms of classroom questioning.First of all,it was found that both expert teachers and novice teachers pose overdoses of close questions under the exam-oriented social context.And novice teachers favor managerial questions,so that the class atmosphere is more active and communicative.Second,compared with expert teachers,novice teachers put much time on the lower cognitive questions,aiming for more active responses from students.Third,the proportion of novice teachers' self-answering is obviously higher than that of expert teachers.When students fail to answer the questions,expert teachers tend to wait more time,and adopt some questioning strategies.In contrast,novice teachers are not confident and skillful enough to adopt questioning strategies.Thus,they tend to wait for a short time,and give the answer by themselves.The findings indicate that novice teachers need more professional training to improve their mastery of questioning skills and raise awareness of questioning.When students give the incorrect answers,they are also expected to be more flexible when adopting questioning strategies and wait-time,so that students can realize their performance and correct errors in time.