A Comparative Study Of Teacher Questioning In English Classrooms Between Novice And Expert Teachers In Junior High Schools

“Classroom questioning” refers to any words that teachers produce in the form of questions or rising tones to elicit feedback from students.Effective classroom questioning is conducive to promoting students’ understanding and mastery of knowledge,improving their language expression and communication skills,while helping teachers to enhance teaching effectiveness.However,among junior high school English teachers,there seem to be some similarities and differences in questioning strategies between novice teachers and expert teachers.These have to a certain extent exerted considerable influence on teaching efficiency.Therefore,this study proposes a new classification framework for classroom questioning based on the classifications of Hakansson & Lindberg(1988)and Barnes(1969)and takes advantage of a corpus-based classroom discourse analysis to specify and compare the classroom questioning of novice and expert junior high school English teachers.By means of a comparative study of the classroom questioning of eight English teachers(four novice teachers and four expert teachers)in two junior high schools of Suzhou,this study has been to answer the following three questions.(1)What are the similarities in the questioning strategies between the novice and expert teachers?(2)Are there any statistically significant differences in questioning strategies between the novice and expert teachers?(3)What are the underlying reasons for the similarities and differences in questioning strategies between novice and expert teachers?According to the conclusion of classroom observation,questionnaire and interview,we have found that:(1)Both novice and expert teachers ask more closed questions and less open questions,and both novice and expert teachers preferred to ask questions and then let the whole class to answer.(2)Compared with expert teachers,novice teachers at the same level of schools seem to ask even more different types of questions with clearer questioning purposes.They prefer to get the whole class to answer the questions together or recommend their students to answer the questions one by one.It is worthy of our particular attention that novice teachers tend to prefer semi-open questions than expert teachers.Expert teachers tend to place more emphasis on open questions that are more reflective.These questions can help stimulate students’ language output.(3)On the whole,both novice and expert teachers need to further improve their questioning strategies in terms of questioning type,mode,and students’ output of language.(4)Four major reasons can account for the similarities and differences between novice teachers’ and expert teachers’ classroom questioning strategies: first of all,novice teachers are not very familiar with the students of different levels,so that they are unable to teach them according to their abilities,which leads to a lack of specificity in questioning;second,novice teachers do not have enough teaching experience to ask more open questions to stimulate students’ thinking;third,novice teachers do not have enough time to conduct educational research and lack research on terminology;fourth,gender of teacher also cause differences in classroom questioning strategies.To address some of the shortcomings of the current classroom questioning in junior high school English class,this study has tried providing some constructive teaching suggestions.Firstly,English teachers should conduct research deeply and systematically on classroom questioning from their own perspective and master scientific and effective questioning strategies;secondly,they should strengthen the illstructured questions to stimulate students’ deeper thinking;thirdly,they should further modify classroom questioning strategies to stimulate students’ interest in language learning and to improve their language learning ability through questions and scientific feedback.Last but not the least,they are supposed to actively cultivate students’ awareness of questioning and help them to change from passive learning to active questioning and exploration,so that they can truly become the masters of the classroom learning.