A Study On The Questioning Strategies Of English Teachers In Senior Middle School

Classroom questioning, as an important part of classroom teaching process, has been widely concerned about by English teachers. Although English teachers in senior high schools “can ask questions” in classroom, they are not necessarily “able to ask effective questions”. That is to say, they can’t very well use questioning strategies to prepare appropriate or effective questions. Appropriate employment of questioning strategies can not only stimulate students’ participation in classroom activities and increase classroom interaction between teacher and learners, but also help to improve students’ communicative ability to express themselves with others in English. Therefore, English teachers in senior high schools should pay attention to how to explore and use the effective questioning strategies.This study, based on the researches about classroom questioning from home and abroad and guided by the theories of “input hypothesis” and “output hypothesis”, aims to interpret the situation of how high school English teachers use questioning strategies properly and its impact on English learners learning, and thus rebuild the efficient English classroom teaching process. The study, adopting the methods of questionnaire, classroom observation and interview, has made a survey on 6 English teachers and 6 classes(310 students) in a key senior high school in Qingdao, aiming to investigate the characteristics of questioning, the questioning strategies involved in the classroom questioning and their problems, and the influence on students’ English learning.The results show that the phenomenon of lacking strategy in teachers’ questioning does exist pervasively in English classes in senior high school, including the lack of planning, the ordinary designing of content, the single way of asking questions and giving feedback and so on. The result of the interview reflects that the phenomenon of lacking questioning strategies does not hinders the effective teaching process from being effectively improved, but also brings adverse effects to students’ communicative ability to express themselves smoothly, to their further development of divergent thinking, and to their confidence to learn English well in the future. Corresponding to the results, English teachers need to strengthen their knowledge on questioning strategies, to understand the content and function of planning strategies, designing strategies, controlling strategies and evaluating strategies, to make sure that the strategies are used in proper proportions. Only in this way are they able to improve the effectiveness of classroom questioning, to increase students’ participation in classroom activities and promote their English learning.But, due to the constraints of time and condition, there are some deficiencies in the research. For instance, the number of the subjects in the survey is small, and is not authoritative enough to represent all the English teachers; the validity and reliability of the adapted questionnaire needs to be further tested in future researches; the study didn’t explore the causes to teachers’ lacking questioning strategies or their inappropriate use of them, which remains to be explored more deeply in further studies. But, generally speaking, the study has achieved the expected goals and the results are rather satisfactory, having provided lot of beneficial suggestions and a practical basis for English teachers to carry out effective questioning, to promote classroom interaction and improve students’ English proficiency.