A Case Study On The Discrepancies Of Senior High School English Teachers’ Beliefs About Classroom Questions And Their Questioning Practices

Classroom questioning has been always an important approach which is applied in each phase in English classroom teaching. It is the bond of two-way activities between teachers and students. According to the survey made by Wang Duqin in 2002, questioning accounts for 20% to 40% in classroom interactional activities. It is the determinant factor for the success or failure of English teaching. To gain a better understanding of the impact of teachers’beliefs about quality questions on their actual practices, case studies were constructed with three English teachers working at certain senior high school in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan province, China. The main aims of this thesis were to investigate the relationship between teachers’beliefs about quality questions and their questioning behaviors in terms of questioning purposes, content focus, students’ cognitive levels, wording and syntax. These four characteristics are recognized as distinctive features of teachers’ beliefs about classroom questions.Semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and the quality questioning quotient which served as an assistant tool were adopted to collect data in this study. The data analysis was deployed surrounding the above four aspects. Results showed that although there is a general consistency between teachers’ beliefs and practices, the discrepancies are also distinctive with respect to the content focus and students’ cognitive levels which the proposed questions test. In China, the research relating to teachers beliefs and practices on classroom questioning is still in its infancy and superficial. Hence much more researches on this topic are being required. The author hopes this study could raise teachers’ attention on classroom questioning and help them reflect their questioning behaviors, improve questioning skills, cultivate students’ thinking ability, and prompt teaching quality. At the same time, it is also expected that the insights of this study will contribute to teachers’ professional development.