The Influence Of Excellent Teachers' Questioning Strategies On Students' Critical Thinking In Junior EFL Class

Language and thinking are closely intermingled.Questioning,as an integrate part of teacher classroom discourse,not only reflects the quality of teacher's teaching,but also affects students' thinking.Classroom questioning is so important,however,the current situation of questioning in junior EFL class is not so satisfactory,such as teachers ask many questions and most of them are at the lowest cognitive level,that is,emphasis on factual and recall knowledge,lack of analysis,questioning,and evaluation of information;insufficient time for students to think;inequal opportunities for teacher-student interactions;too general feedback.Based on the sociocultural theory and conversational analysis,this research adopts quantitative and qualitative research methods,and takes four demo classes from Demo Teaching Series of Zhejiang Style Excellent Teachers as the objects of study.By observing,transcribing and analyzing the interactions between teachers' questioning and students,this paper studies the effects of excellent teachers' questioning strategies on students' critical thinking in junior EFL class,and answers the following two research questions:(1)What questioning strategies do excellent teachers employ in English classes?(2)How do these questioning strategies affect students' critical thinking?The major findings of the research can be summarized as follows.Firstly,questioning strategies employed by excellent teachers are diverse,of which different question types directly affect students' CT.Secondly,excellent teachers offer studentsmore wait-time and provide them with opportunities for further discussion and self-reflection.Thirdly,excellent teachers use further questions to stimulate students to think more deeply and comprehensively.However,in the context of large-scale classroom and limited time,excellent teachers give themselves very short time to think about students' answers,which reduces the output of teachers' high-level questions and effective feedback to some extent and further restricts students' CT.In the end,the pedagogical implications are proposed for English teachers as follows.Firstly,questioning strategies should be an integral part of teachers' professional development and paid more attention to training.Secondly,based on students' cognitive levels and ZPD,teachers need to design more rational and effective questions and lengthen wait-time appropriately.Thirdly,more students should be encouraged to participate in classroom questioning and answering,thereby creating a classroom culture in which all students learn by speaking,listening,and supporting each other together.Finally,teacher's feedback should not be regarded as the end of classroom communication,but as a means to promote teacher-student interactions and language output.