A Comparative Study Of Teachers’ Questioning Between The Novice And Expert English Teachers In Senior High Schools

Teacher talk is more than the tool for carrying out the teaching plans, and it is also an important source of input for students (Nunan1991:189). Besides, it also has an influence on the output of the students in the aspects of quality and quantity. Classroom teachers’questioning occupies a large proportion in teacher talk (Leven&Long,1987),and is one of the most frequently employed teaching strategies (Freiberg&Driscoll,1996). By teachers’questioning,"Teachers can not only involve students into communication interaction, and also encourage their students to modify their own speech and makes it comprehensive"(Richards&Lockhart,1996:185).Therefore, such research on teachers’questioning, which is an important means of classroom teaching, makes great difference to English teaching.Teachers’questioning is an important component in the research field of second language acquisition. Currently the research focuses mainly on the questioning of college classroom and seldom on the comparative research of senior high school classroom. Therefore, based on the previous studies from home and abroad, employing Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, Michael Long’s interaction theory and Swain’s comprehensible output hypothesis in the second language acquisition as the theoretical foundations, this research chooses four t eachers and171students as the subjects and makes an investigation of the current situation in four fundamental aspects, question types, question modifications, wait time and teachers’feedback, by means of questionnaires, classroom observations and interviews with the purpose to explore the features of senior high school teachers’ questioning and students’ expectations towards it by comparison and put forward some suggestions that indicate how to improve questioning behaviors. Besides, the author tries to find out:(1) What is the teachers’general perception of questioning?(2) Are there any differences between expert and novice teachers in classroom questioning? If any, what are they?(3) What are the students’expectations towards teachers’questioning?Based on the data analysis, it is revealed that teachers have laid emphasis on the teachers’questioning and ask questions as effectively as possible under most circumstances. The detailed results are as follows:(1) Expert teachers ask1\3more questions than novice teachers in general. At the same time, the two types of teachers ask more display questions than referential ones, and expert teachers ask twice to three times referential questions more than novice teachers.(2) Expert teachers prefer to prompts and repetition strategies while novice teachers like repetition and prompt better instead to modify their speeches.(3) In response to students’answers, expert teachers give more sufficient time than novice teachers.(4) Both kinds of teachers give students positive feedback, but expert teachers often explain some extra information to optimize the answers while novice teachers often employ simple positive feedback.Based on these problems, the author gives some constructive suggestions: Teachers had better study some related theories on teachers’questioning, and enrich questioning types as well as increasing wait time; they should observe peers’classes and reflect to develop themselves.However, due to the limitations of researching conditions of the author, the present study on teachers’ questioning is carried out in only four aspects unsystematically. In sum, only when the current situations and problems of teachers’ questioning are well paid a lot of attention, can English teachers improve their questioning techniques effectively, make more students involved in the active interaction and provide some reference for the coming scholars.