An Action Research On Junior High School English Teachers' Classroom Questioning

Classroom questioning is the main method of interaction between teachers and students in English classroom teaching.The quality of classroom questioning will not only affect classroom efficiency,but also affect students' enthusiasm in class.At present,the theoretical knowledge of classroom questioning at home and abroad has remarkable achievements.However,when searching lots of related literature,the author finds that there are few studies on junior high school English classroom questioning,especially about action research aspect.Therefore,the action research of junior high school English classroom questioning is of great significance.The author conducted a Collaborative Action Research with a junior high school English teacher,intending to improve the teacher's classroom questioning.Ms.A volunteered to be the subject,so she and her 54 students from Class 1,Grade 8 were chosen as the research subjects.The action research lasted for 8weeks.In this study,the main research methods are classroom observation and interview.In order to help Ms.A analyze and improve her classroom questioning,the author went deep into the classroom and discussed classroom questioning with Ms.A.The author and Ms.A planned for questioning together before class,the author recorded the process of questioning for Ms.A during class,and the author shared feedback with Ms.A after class.This study aims to address the following questions:(1)Is there any change in question types in Ms.A's class in the process of theaction research? If there is any change,what is it?(2)Is there any change in questioning strategies of Ms.A in the process of the action research? If there is any change,what is it?(3)Is there any change in students' answering questions because of Ms.A's change(if any)in question types and questioning strategies?The author transcribed the video and recording to analyze the data of Ms.A's classroom questioning based on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and the theory of classroom questioning strategies.The main findings are as follows:(1)At the end of the research,the number of high-level questions put forward by Ms.A increased and the types of questions were evenly distributed.At the same time,Ms.A began to consciously design questions before class,so as to improve the quality of the questioning.(2)At the end of the research,Ms.A's classroom questioning strategies have been improved: the teacher gave different length of wait-time according to the difficulty of questions;avoided asking the same student repeatedly,and asked target student with the target question;increased the frequency of feedback and the number of positive feedback;and the number of probing questions increased.In general,Ms.A has a better understanding of the theory of questioning strategies and is more proficient in using questioning strategies.(3)It was found that the changes of the question types and questioning strategies had changed students' classroom performance to a certain extent: thenumber of volunteer students increased,while the number of students talk also increased with the improvement of question types and questioning strategies.So the improvement of Ms.A's classroom questioning has improved students' learning interest and classroom enthusiasm.Based on the improvements made by Ms.A,the implications of this study are as follows:(1)Teachers should acquire more about the theoretical knowledge of classroom questioning,and carefully design questions before teaching.(2)Teachers should design more high-level questions to inspire students' thinking and teachers should design questions with appropriate difficulty according to students' cognitive level.(3)Teachers should design both questions and questioning strategies in advance in order to achieve better teaching results.There are also some limitations in this study,such as the interruption of the research duration;the scope of the study is small;there is no use of statistical tools,the transcription process is tedious.The author also puts forward some suggestions for improvement,hoping to provide some references for other researchers.