Acase Study On Teachers' Questions In High School English Reading Class From The Perspective Of Thinking Quality

After the key competencies of English subject were raised,the cultivation of students' thinking quality,emphasized in the key competencies,has become an important task.Reading teaching has become an important class type to cultivate thinking by virtue of the characteristics of flexibility and extendibility.Teachers' questioning is a process of multiple interactions between teachers and students,which helps to improve learners' thinking quality.Many scholars have studied questioning and thinking quality respectively,including the meaning,characteristics,training methods,types of questioning,contents and characteristics of thinking quality.However,it does not combine the three characteristics emphasized in the Senior English Curriculum Standard with the real teaching.Most of the studies stay at the theoretical level,the combination of theory and practice is still insufficient.Therefore,it is necessary to make a case study on promoting the development of students' thinking quality by teachers' questioning in high school English reading teaching.This study conducted classroom observations of 16 reading lessons from four high school English teachers at the Attached High School to Nankai University and transcribed the classroom observations.Teachers' questions were divided into six types by revised Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives.The author also conducted interviews with four teachers,with the intention of discovering the teachers' understanding about the role of questioning in thinking quality andcognition about thinking quality.The author analyzes the classroom observations and interviews and finds that:(1)Four English teachers' classroom questions include all six types of questions,but the most frequently asked are remembering,understanding,analyzing and applying questions.(2)Students' thinking quality involves agility,flexibility,complexity,logicality,criticalness,and creativity,but agility,flexibility,complexity,and logicality have been greatly improved,there is a lack of training in criticalness and creativity.(3)Teachers affirm the role of questioning in cultivating thinking quality,but their knowledge of questioning and thinking quality is not comprehensive enough,and there are differences between teachers' own cognition and real teaching effect,which is worth exploring.Based on the results,the author puts forward some suggestions for the current teaching to cultivate students' thinking quality.For example,when teachers ask questions in English reading classes,they should balance the proportion of different question types,follow the order of students' thinking development,and gradually ask questions from low-level to high-level.