A Comparative Study Of Thinking Levels Of The Questioning Between Novice And Proficient Teachers In Junior High School English Reading Class

As one of the key competencies,students' higher-order thinking ability has aroused teachers' and researchers' attention.And teachers' questioning is one of the most important ways of developing students' thinking quality.However,compared with proficient and expert teachers,novice teachers perform less well in the development of students' higher-order thinking by questioning.Based on Long's Interaction Hypothesis,this study adopts qualitative research methods to answer the following three research questions: 1)What reading questions are raised by novice and proficient English teachers in junior high school from the perspective of thinking levels? 2)What are the similarities and differences of the above questions raised by novice teachers and proficient teachers? 3)What are the reasons behind the above similarities and differences? To answer the first two research questions,classroom observation and questionnaires are employed.Moreover,the third research question is answered by interviews and related literature.After analyzing the data from the classroom observation,questionnaires,and interviews,the author discovers three similarities and four differences and tries to explain their reasons.Concerning the similarities,to begin with,both novice and proficient teachers pay less attention to the questions for the development of knowledge utilization because of the following two reasons: novice and proficient teachers' unclear understanding of knowledge utilization and their inappropriate handling of students' uneven language proficiency.Besides,both novice and proficient teachers raise more questions for lower-order thinking development,as teachers,under heavy teaching tasks and limited teaching time,tend to follow the questions designed in the textbook where more questions are in lower-order thinking levels.Ultimately,questions for metacognition are more than those for self-system.The author uncovers the reasons from two aspects.For one thing,the development of self-system is influenced by text types,for another,the development of metacognition is stressed in reading materials while that of self-system is not emphasized.As for the differences,three kinds of questions raised by novice teachers are fewer than those raised by proficient teachers: questions for the development of higher-order thinking,analysis,and self-system.However,in pre-reading stages,questions for higher-order thinking raised by novice teachers are more creative than those raised by proficient teachers.The first three differences in questioning are mainly caused by novice teachers' inexperience: 1)Novice teachers' inexperience of handling trivial affairs makes them have less time for text analysis.Therefore,the contents of higher-order thinking cannot be well explored.2)Because of insufficient time for text analysis,novice teachers are more likely to conform to the questions in the textbook where there are fewer questions for higherorder thinking development.The above two statements can explain why there are fewer questions for higher-order thinking development raised by novice teachers.3)Novice teachers are inexperienced in responding to students' errors,which causes the imbalanced use of corrective feedback strategies.Therefore,questions for analysis raised by novice teachers are fewer than those raised by proficient teachers.4)Novice teachers are inexperienced in employing students' experience in teaching.However,the self-system development is related to the utilization of students' experience.Therefore,questions for self-system raised by novice teachers are fewer than those raised by proficient teachers.However,from the questions raised by novice teachers in prereading stages,we can infer that novice teachers are able to design higher-order thinking questions.Finally,according to the major findings,some suggestions are provided for novice teachers,proficient teachers,and the authorities of English instruction.