A Case Study Of The Influence Of Teacher's Questioning Types In High School English Reading Class On Classroom Interaction

Classroom interaction refers to the process in which teachers and students communicate with each other and promote each other with the aid of words,gestures and other auxiliary means in the classroom.In English classes,it is mainly generated by IRF(Initiation-Response-Feedback).Teachers' questioning is an important means to create the classroom interaction.Thus,the design of teachers' questioning types has a profound influence on classroom interaction.Scholars at home and abroad have studied the impact of teachers' questioning types on classroom interaction.Most of them classified questioning types into referential questions and display questions and found that when students responded to referential questions,they were more active and the classroom interaction was better.However,there is still a long way to explain how do other questioning types affect classroom interaction and to what extent do these types affect classroom interaction.This paper divides teachers' questioning types in terms of questioning form and explores its effect on students' response quality and interaction levels.The research questions are as follows:1.What are the questioning types teachers have used in the reading class and what's the frequency of each type?2.How does the questioning type affect students' response quality?3.How does the questioning type affect classroom interaction level?This paper selects 10 reading lessons from the 10 th National High-Quality Senoir English Cases as the research resources.With classroom observation and case study,it studies the teachers' questioning types,their frequency and their impact on students' response quality and interaction levels quantitatively and qualitatively.The findings are as follows:(1)In High School English reading classes,teachers mainly use four questioning types: “Yes/No” questions,“Or” questions,“Wh-” questions and guided questions.The frequency of each type varies greatly.“Wh-” questions come first with the use of 10 teachers,followed by “Yes/No” questions,the guided questions and “Or” questions.Among “Wh-” questions,open and reasoning questions account for a large proportion,while there is a small number of factual questions.Moreover,these types used in “pre-reading”,“while-reading” and “post-reading” phases remain different.“While-reading” ranks first,then“pre-reading” and “post-reading”.(2)The teachers' questioning types make great difference to students' response quality.Students reply to open and reasoning questions with much longer and more complex sentences,followed by factual questions and “Yes/No” questions.Besides,their responses to guided questions and “Or” questions are of lower quality.(3)The teachers' questioning types influence classroom interaction levels greatly.“Yes/No” questions,“Or” questions and guided questions mainly produce the first level interactions and “Wh-”questions affect classroom interactions at all levels.What's more,factual questions have the greatest impact on the first level while reasoning and open questions influence other levels most.According to the research findings,this paper provides relevant suggestions for senior high school English teachers.On the one hand,teachers should pay attention to the design of questioning types,and make clear they affect classroom interaction significantly.On the other hand,teachers ought to design questions reasonably and use more reasoning and open questions in their reading classes to promote classroom interaction and encourage students to participate in the class activities.