A Study Of Rural-area Teachers’ Ouestioning Types And Strategies In Senior High English Reading Classes

Teacher questioning is a common teaching skill in English classrooms. A good question can enhance the effectiveness of teaching. According to the English Curriculum for Senior High School, reading is a skill which the students must master, and in the college entrance examination, the reading comprehension accounts for a large part. Therefore, a good question in reading classes is especially important. Nowadays, on the one hand, as English reading becomes a required skill for English learners, the author tends to think that much attention needs to be paid to English teaching in rural areas. However, in recent years, researches on teacher questioning mainly focus on the English teachers in colleges and universities, and some researchers have conducted empirical studies on English teacher questioning in senior high schools. But few researchers investigate teacher questioning in English reading classes in the rural-area senior high schools. Thus, to conduct a study on teacher questioning in English reading classes of rural-area senior high schools is of great importance in theory and practice.The five participant teachers all come from the same rural-area senior high school. They are of different age, education background and teaching experience. This study adopts 3 research methods, namely, classroom observation, interview and questionnaire. To be specific, this study aims to answer the following questions:(1) What are the types of questions in reading classes of rural-area high school English teachers?(2) What are the questioning strategies that the rural-area high school English teachers adopt in their teaching practice?The result of the study shows that the teachers prefer to raise display questions rather than referential questions. They tend to raise the remembering questions, the understanding questions and the applying questions while the analyzing questions, the evaluating questions and the creating questions are seldom used. The reasons are as follows: for one thing, Chinese traditional learning culture pays much attention to rote learning; for another thing, teachers learn little about the Bloom’s Taxonomy. As for the questioning strategy, all of the five teachers use some certain questioning strategies in their class. There exists inappropriateness in their questioning strategy usage. There are four reasons for it. First, the teachers tend to choose strategies which they like or get used to. Second, some teachers do not want to spend too much time on the strategies which they are unfamiliar with. Third, they are too busy to think about different kinds of questioning strategies. At last, they use some strategies without being aware of the reason why they need to use the strategies because of having no theoretical background. Therefore, there is a lot to do to improve teachers questioning effectiveness.At last, the author puts forward some suggestions for the rural-area high school teachers to make effective questions, such as, putting forward higher requirements, having further learning, diversifying questioning types according to different aims and using questioning strategies properly.