A Case Study On The Effects Of Teacher Questioning On Students’ Classroom Participation In Senior High School English Class

As the most typical teacher discourse in English classroom learning,teacher questioning is one of the ways to promote teacher-student interaction.Teacher questioning is not only the main source for students to obtain comprehensible input,but also provide students with opportunities for language output.Effective classroom questioning is conducive to students’ language output,the cultivation of innovative thinking and the promotion of teacher-student communication.Therefore,as one of the most fundamental means of classroom teaching,classroom questioning has been paid much attention by teachers’ discourse researchers at home and abroad.In recent years,researchers have also begun to pay attention to the effects of teachers’ classroom questioning on students’ classroom participation,but most of these studies focus on college and junior high school English classes.And there is relatively insufficient research on the effect of senior high school English teacher questioning on students’ classroom participation.The importance of teacher questioning and the lack of related research in China make it necessary to conduct in-depth research on senior high English teacher questioning.Based on the theories of comprehensible input hypothesis,output hypothesis and interaction hypothesis,four senior high school English teachers and 143 students in four classes taught by them in Longquan Middle School of Chengdu are selected as the case research participants.Through classroom observation,questionnaire,interview and other means,the following two research questions in this thesis are conducted:(1)What is the status quo of the English teachers’ questioning in terms of ways,types and modification strategies in senior high school English class?(2)How do the senior high school English teachers’ questioning ways,types,and modification strategies affect students’ classroom participation?Based on the above research,the following conclusions can be drawn:(1)The status quo of teacher questioning is reflected in the following three aspects: in terms of questioning ways,teachers often use nominating and chorus-answering in senior high school English class.In terms of questioning types,teachers use more display questions than referential questions.In terms of questioning modification strategies,the most common modification strategies used by teachers are probing and prompting,and the paraphrasing is least used.(2)As for the effects of teacher questioning on students’ participation in class,most of the students are more motivated to participate in the nominating,while volunteering are more conducive to the output of successful C-unit.Besides,most of the students are more motivated to participate in display questions,while referential questions could stimulate students to produce more rich and more complex C-unit output.All the four questioning modification strategies can promote students’ participation in class,especially probing is more conducive to students’ C-unit output in English class.Based on research analysis and theoretical foundation,the author provides the following practical suggestions for optimizing senior high school English teachers’ questioning strategies.To begin with,teachers should avoid using a single questioning way and encourage students to actively participate in the classroom to achieve the effectiveness of teacher questioning.In the next place,teachers should respect the individual differences of students and balance the types of questions to promote the development of students’ thinking quality and learning ability.Besides,teachers need to control the questioning process flexibly,pay attention to students’ humanistic care,and use questioning modification strategies tactfully to stimulate students’ enthusiasm for classroom participation.In the end,teachers need to give reasonable thinking time based on students’ classroom feedback so as to improve the efficiency of classroom teaching.