A Study On Cognitive Levels Of Questions Raised By Teachers In High School English Reading Class

Reading teaching plays a vital role in high school English classrooms.As a basic interactive form in reading class,effective classroom questioning can help stimulate students’ interest in learning and promote teacher-student communication.Moreover,the cognitive level of the questions asked by teachers has an essential influence on the development of students’ thinking.Based on Anderson’s revised taxonomy of educational goals in the cognitive domain,the questions can be divided into lower-cognitive-level and higher-cognitive-level questions.Through extensive literature on access,the author finds many studies focus on the current situation about cognitive levels of questions.However,few studies have focused on comparing the cognitive levels of questions raised by novice and expert teachers in actual teaching.What’s more,comparative analysis from the perspectives of different reading stages are even rarer.Therefore,this research takes Anderson’s taxonomy in cognitive domain as a theoretical framework to explore the following three research questions:(1)What is the overall cognitive level distribution of the questions asked by teachers in different reading stages?(2)What is the cognitive level distribution of questions raised by novice and expert teachers in different reading stages?(3)What are the factors that affect the cognitive levels of teachers’ classroom questions?In order to explore the above three questions,this research selected three novice teachers and three expert teachers from two public high schools in Shanxi Province as the research subjects.Based on the classroom records of four reading materials,the author screened the teachers’ questions,classified them into different cognitive levels,and then used EXCEL and SPSS 21.0 to conduct a statistical and comparative analysis of the frequency and percentage of questions.Combining classroom observation and interview data,the author draws the following conclusions.Firstly,regarding the overall distribution of cognitive levels of questions,teachers raise more questions at the low cognitive level.The frequency of questions at different cognitive levels in descending order is: understanding,remembering,applying,evaluating,analyzing,and creating.The most frequently asked questions at each level are interpreting,recognizing,executing,critiquing,differentiating and planning questions.Moreover,the number of remembering questions is the largest in the pre-reading stage.Furthermore,understanding questions account for the highest proportion in the while-reading stage.Finally,the frequency of remembering and understanding questions is the highest in the post-reading stage.Most of the applying,evaluating,and creating questions in the whole class are distributed in this stage.Secondly,there is a significant difference in the cognitive levels distribution of questions asked by novice and expert teachers.The ratio of high and low cognitive questions raised by expert teachers is more suitable than novice teachers.And expert teachers have higher requirements on students’ thinking about the understanding questions.They raise more questions at high cognitive levels,and it reveals that they pay more attention to developing students’ higher-order thinking.Besides,it is worth mentioning that novice teachers raise more recognizing questions.They can flexibly use multimedia materials to guide students to recognize information and activate students’ thinking.Furthermore,in the three reading stages,there is a significant difference in the proportion of cognitive levels of questions asked by novice and expert teachers in the post-reading stage.At this stage,novice teachers still attach great importance to guiding students to understand the text in-depth,with the most understanding questions.In contrast,expert teachers raise more questions at remembering,analyzing,evaluating,and creating levels than novice teachers.It suggests that they pay more attention to students’ basic knowledge and the development of students’ higher-order thinking.Thirdly,the factors that affect the cognitive level of questions asked by teachers can be divided into four dimensions: teachers’ internal factors,preparation of questions before class,the focus of questions at different reading stages and the external environmental factors.Regarding teachers’ internal factors,teachers’ knowledge literacy and teaching tact affect teachers’ preparation for questions.In addition,teachers’ views about questioning also influence the jumping-off point of the questions asked by them.Regarding the preparation of questions before class,the understanding of students’ knowledge level and textbook analysis directly affect the content of the question.Regarding the focus of questions at different reading stages,due to the purpose of questioning at different stages is different,the cognitive level of questions in three reading stages is different.Firstly,a large number of remembering questions are used to activate background knowledge in the pre-reading stage.Secondly,there are many understanding questions to guide students to understand the text deeply in the while-reading stage.thirdly,teachers focus on promoting the development of students’ higher-order thinking with higher-cognitive-level questions in the post-reading stage.In addition,under the pressure of the examination and the ideological environment of "focus only on scores",teachers mainly adopt a knowledge-based teaching model,so more questions are at the low cognitive level.Based on the above conclusions,the author puts forward suggestions for novice and expert teachers to improve the effectiveness of classroom questions and establishes a deep instruction paradigm for teachers’ classroom questioning.This paradigm aims to provide a reference for teachers to design high-quality questions and raise questions effectively in the classroom.