A Contrastive Study On Classroom Questioning Between English Novice And Expert Teachers In Junior High School Reading Classes

This study is undertaken to investigate the differences of questioning between novice and expert English teachers in junior high school.The theoretical basis of the research is Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,Long’s Interaction Hypothesis and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development Theory.The significance of this study is to help front-line novice teachers find the gap between themselves and expert teachers in questioning,improve questioning quality,and promote self reflection and their professional development.The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1.What are the differences between novice teachers and expert teachers in terms of the form of questioning?2.What are the differences between novice teachers and expert teachers in terms of the quality of questioning?3.What are the differences between novice teachers and expert teachers in terms of the reflection of questioning?Subjects of this study are three expert English teachers（E1,E2,and E3）and three novice English teachers（N1,N2,and N3）in Grade 8,Expert teachers have the following characteristics.Firstly,they have more than fifteen teaching years with senior professional titles.Secondly,their teaching results have ranked in the top three in the same subject of the same grade in past three years.Thirdly,students’ evaluation on their teaching is A.Instead,three novice teachers are those who have the teaching year of 0-3 years with primary professional titles.The instruments of this study include classroom observation and interview.The data is from six teachers’ open classes of English reading.Data collection and analysis include three steps:firstly,use a pen recorder to record the six classes during the classroom observation.Secondly,transcribe audio-recording into texts,analyze the use of questioning type,questioning method,questioning strategy and score questioning quality.Thirdly,interview six teachers in terms of reflection method and content.In this study,Excel software and SPSS software are used for statistical collection and analysis.Moreover,descriptive analysis is carried out in combination with specific teaching excerpts.This study has yielded the following major findings:Firstly,as for questioning form,expert teachers perform better in using different questioning methods and strategies to increase students’ language output than novice teachers.The frequency of referential questions of the expert teachers（40%）is higher than that of novice teachers（27%）.Moreover,expert teachers tend to use In Chorus（43%）and Appointing（28%）while novice teachers tend to use Volunteering（26%）apart from In Chorus（32%）,and the frequency of Self-answering（18%）is also higher than that of expert teachers（5%）for saving time.And when students have difficulty answering questions,expert teachers prefer to use the strategies of Probing（29%）and Prompting（27%）to help students find the right answer,while novice teachers prefer to use the strategies of Translating（37%）and Repeating（28%）.Secondly,as for questioning quality,the questioning quality of expert teachers is significantly higher than that of novice teachers.Based on scoring the questioning quality of expert teachers and novice teachers by four observers,it draws that expert teachers perform better than novice teachers in terms of Interesting（ME1=3.75,ME2=4.25,ME3=4.25;MN1=3.00,MN2=2.50,MN3=3.50）,Enlightening ME2=4.50,ME3=4.00;MN1=2.75,MN2=2.50,MN3=3.25)and Hierarchical（ME1=4.50,ME2=4.00,ME3=4.25;MN1=3.25,MN2=3.50,MN3=2.75）.And p（sig）is below 0.05 based on Kendall’s W test,which means that scoring results given by four observers are consistent.Thirdly,as for questioning reflection,expert teachers tend to use communicative reflection and writing action research reports,while novice teachers prefer to use the reflection method of writing reflection diaries and watching teaching videos by themselves.In terms of the content of reflection,expert teachers pay more attention to the cultivation of students’ ability,including whether questions inspire students to think and whether questions are conducive to students’ language output.Instead,novice teachers pay more attention to the difficulty of questions and the correlation between the questions and teaching tasks.The study provides the following implications.Firstly,teachers should elaborately design questions,increase the proportion of referential questions,and flexibly use a variety of questioning strategies and questioning methods to promote students’ language output.Secondly,teachers should fully understand students’ learning ability and anticipate the answers that students may provide.Novice teachers need to pay more attention to interesting,enlightening and hierarchical characteristics of questions,and cultivate students’ creative thinking ability in the process of guiding students to participate in the class.Finally,in the step of reflection,novice teachers should combine communicative reflection method with personal reflection method,and pay more attention to the improvement of questions on students’ ability in reflection content.There are still some limitations in the present study.Firstly,the study sample is not large enough to generalize the results to more groups.Secondly,the scoring results can not ensure 100%objectivity.Therefore,future studies need to expand study samples and establish a unified scoring standard.