A Comparative Study Of English Classroom Questioning Between The Novice And Expert Teachers In Junior High School

Classroom questioning, as an important aspect of classroom teaching, plays an important role in the sense that it not only serves as a device to stimulate students’ participation in the classroom discussion, but also promotes the interaction between teacher and students. Moreover, effective classroom questioning can help students to learn more effectively. Thus, the classroom questioning has become a hot topic in English education research both at home and abroad. There are plenty of researches about classroom questioning, among which most are theoretical studies of classroom questioning, including the aspects of classroom questioning effectiveness, questioning strategies and question types. However, there are few comparative studies of classroom questioning between expert and novice teachers, especially in the English teaching. Moreover, most of these studies focus on senior high school, and the method of case study is mainly applied in these studies. The compared aspects are usually focus on the questioning implementation. However, the teachers’ understanding of classroom questioning was hardly taken into the consideration. Thus, this study takes the aspects of teachers’ understanding of classroom questioning into consideration, in the expectation of comparing the classroom questioning between novice and expert teachers comprehensively, which can help novice teachers to improve classroom teaching effectiveness, promote novice teachers’ professional development and improve student’s participation in the class. Moreover the study can promote the development of the theory of classroom question.Based on those researches, this study carries out a comparative study of English classroom questioning between expert and novice teachers of junior high school. Twelve teachers(six novice teachers and six expert teachers) were selected from Hangzhou city as subjects, and one class of each is selected to be observed. After natural observation, most teachers were interviewed on the classroom questioning after class. The research questions are addressed as follows:What are the differences of the understanding of classroom questioning between novice and expert English teacher?What are the differences of questioning implementation between novice and expert English teacher?With the quantitative and qualitative analysis, it is found that there are quite a lot of differences between expert and novice teachers in classroom questioning. The consideration of and attitude towards question design between expert teachers and novice teachers are quite different in the question design. Expert teachers pay more attention to the classroom questioning and take more consideration to the cognitive level of students and degree of difficulty of questions than novice teachers do. Moreover, most expert teachers design the question order according to students’ cognitive level, while most novice teachers design the questioning order according to the difficulty level of question itself. Differences also occurred in stage of questioning implementation between expert teachers and novice teachers. In terms of the question type, novice teachers pose much more closed questions than expert teachers do. When it comes to cognitive level of questioning,they pose fewer creating questions and evaluating questions than the expert teachers do. In terms of questioning strategy, novice teachers put emphasis on repetition and redirection, while expert teachers focus on prompting and probing. In terms of waiting time, the wait time of expert teachers is longer than those of novice teachers. In terms of feedback, novice teachers adopt more simple positive feedback and praise students more with repetition than expert teachers do.The innovation of this paper is comparing the expert and novice teachers’ questioning in junior high English class and taking the understanding classroom questioning between novice and expert English teachers into consideration. However, due to the limitations of researching conditions, the present study on classroom questioning is carried out in only several aspects unsystematically, and the subjects are just limited in twelve English teachers in junior school in Hangzhou. In sum, only when the current situation and problems of classroom questioning are given more attention, can English teachers improve their questioning skills effectively.