Questioning In A Junior Middle School English Classroom

Classroom questioning plays a vital role in English teaching, and because of this it has been researched for nearly 100 years. But most of the research has been performed abroad, and moreover, has been focused on learning and teaching in a first language as opposed to a second language. Research on classroom questioning in China started quite late and for this reason much of the knowledge is still incomplete. So there is a great need for deeper understanding of English classroom questioning behaviour in China, particularly in the heretofore ignored area of junior middle schools.The aim of this thesis is to study junior middle school questioning behaviour, and it attempts to make an exploration of the teachers'questioning behaviour in class and their cognition of questioning. The purposes of this study are as follows: 1) To investigate how many questions teacher asks in an average class; and what form of question takes in relation to being convergent/divergent, display/pseudo-referential/referential, and their cognitive level; 2) To discover what lengths and types of answers tend to be elicited by those different question types, and which combination leads the best answers for different purposes; 3) To find out which strategies teacher use to elicit answers; 4) To investigate the way in which teacher makes use of interaction to gain meaningful negotiation and how this reflects on the level of real communication in the classroom.Mainly based on Bloom's(1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive Domain, the author adopted three different instruments to carry out this study: classroom observation, interviews with the observed teachers and questionnaires to both the teachers and students. This included 32 recorded classes taught by eight different teachers, interviews with each of those teachers, and questionnaires to 150 students and 64 teachers. The author then analyzed the results collected by these methods.