An Action Research On Teacher's Questioning Strategies In The Reading Class To Cultivate Senior High School Students' Critical Thinking Ability

The National English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017)pointed out that the specific goal of English curriculum has changed from cultivating students' comprehensive language application ability to cultivating and developing students' English Key Competencies which includes language ability,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning ability.Critical thinking ability is an important element of thinking quality and it's one of the most important thinking abilities for students.Therefore,in recent years,many teachers have focused on cultivating students' critical thinking ability.Moreover,at the senior high school's English reading teaching,the teacher's questioning is not only as a bridge between teacher and student's communication,but also it's an important approach to cultivate students' critical thinking ability.Thus,the author discussed the following three questions from the perspective of the teacher's questioning strategies and students' critical thinking ability:1.What's the present situation of teacher's questioning strategies in the reading class at senior high school?2.At present senior high school's English reading classes,what's the correlation between the teacher's questioning and students' critical thinking ability?3.How does the teachers use effective questioning strategies to cultivate student's critical thinking ability?In view of the above research questions,before the action research,the author selected six teachers from different schools in Xinyu City as the research participants,the author made a classroom observation on each teacher's questioning strategies in the reading class,and delivered a questionnaire to the students in their classes.It aimed to know about the present situation of teacher's questioning strategies in the reading class at senior high school and understand the correlation between the teacher's questioning and students' critical thinking ability.Meanwhile,the action research question is identified on the basis of analyzing above questions.During the process of the implementation of action research,in order to discuss how to useeffective questioning strategies to cultivate student's critical thinking ability,the author selected two classes of XXX Middle school in Xinyu City to carry out a semester of action research.Finally,through the collation and analysis of the data,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)Most teachers pay more attention to the teaching of language knowledge,instead,most of them didn't fully make the function of questioning to effectively use questioning strategies and neglected the important role of questioning in cultivating students' critical thinking ability.(2)Through the correlation analysis,it's concluded that there is a significant correlation between teachers' questioning and students' critical thinking ability in the reading class,and different types of teacher's questioning have different effects on students' critical thinking ability.(3)The result of two cycles of action research indicates that it can cultivate students' critical thinking ability by putting forward effective questioning strategies from the following five aspects: the design of questioning,the ways of questioning,the waiting time of questioning,the teacher's reaction towards students' answers and the reflection of questions.