| In senior high school English reading instruction,questions can be provided by teachers to work as a scaffolding in guiding students to comprehend the text and think deeply.Nevertheless,to some extent,the efficiency of reading instruction would be influenced by the number of questions,the relevance between questions,and the logicality of questions.Therefore,it is noteworthy for teachers to explore how to design reasonable and effective questions in English reading teaching.As sequences of interrelated questions,question-chain features in its logic and progressiveness and thereby enhancing reading efficiency.The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017)emphasizes that students should not be limited to the mastery of language knowledge such as words and phrases.Instead,students are supposed to be guided to realize the true and meaningful textual comprehension through extracting,inferring,comparing,analyzing,and summarizing the content of an article.It is advisable to design series of progressive and logical question-chain on the part of teachers so that students can read critically and reflect on the text in the process of resolving a series of question-chain,rather than read superficially,centering on the mechanical memory of words,phrases and grammar.Therefore,based on Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive domain,this research adopts the action research method to explore whether the optimization of question-chain has a positive impact on the development of students’ English language comprehension abilities.If question-chain can contribute to promoting students’ English language comprehension abilities,what are the specific aspects? And the following two questions are further addressed:1.What influences will the question-chain based senior high English reading teaching bring about on students’ abilities to extract information and comprehend textual meaning?2.What influences will the question-chain based senior high English reading teaching bring about on students’ abilities to make reasoning and analysis as well as make evaluation?In this research,56 students in Grade One of a senior school taught by the research were engaged in the action research for one semester.Classroom observations,teaching logs,interviews,and reading tests were carried out and data were collected and analyzed to confirm the effects that question-chain has on students’ English language comprehension abilities development.The action research is conducted following the steps of “problem identification-hypotheses making-planning-implementation-observation-reflection-finding out new problemhypotheses making-revised planning-implementation-observation-reflection”.Through analyzing quantitative and qualitative data from two rounds of action research,it can be concluded that question-chain based English reading teaching in senior high school exerts a positive influence on the enhancement of students’ language comprehension abilities.In terms of the ability to extract information and understand the textual meaning,question-chain enables students to be guided by extracting,comparing,interpreting and summarizing textual content so as to better comprehend the main information,writing purpose and the author’s attitudes conveyed by the multimodal discourse as well as the textual meaning.In terms of the ability to make reasoning and analysis as well as evaluation,question-chain enables students to identify the facts,evidences and ideas,apply what they have learned in other contexts,analyze the textual meaning and writing structure based on context and specific evidence,even make reasonable evaluations about the theme.However,since the action research is conducted only for one semester among the students who are taught by the researcher,the time period maybe not sufficient.To a certain extent,the researcher’s limited cognitive competence may influence the effective implementation and development of question-chain teaching,which is also an effort that the researcher attempts to make in the future. |
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