A Case Study On Classroom Questioning Of English Reading Classes In Senior High School

Teachers questioning, as a basic form of classroom interaction, plays an important role in fostering students’ comprehensible input and output and development of students’thinking ability. Questioning has already become the main interaction which is most often used in class. In class, teachers often use questioning to trigger students’ interest, inspect and know about students’ learning situation, transfer knowledge, and communicate information with each other. Obviously, questioning is the main source of students’ input of language and it also provides opportunity for students to output their language. Questioning also promotes communication between teacher and students, information exchange between students, and offers a forum for classroom interaction. Therefore, motivating students to participate actively in classroom interaction is a problem which is worth attending for most English teachers.By observing and analyzing the ten classes taught by ten teachers (selected from Grade 1 and Grade 2) and combining the relative studies of teacher questioning, the author discovered the following problems:there are too many knowledge questions and comprehension questions, but few critical questions; there is too much chorus answering, where students answer questions passively and few students raise questions; the waiting-time is too short for students to think deeply and accordingly it’s difficult to activate students’ interest and quite harmful to students’ expanding thinking.In order to study the questioning behavior further, the author randomly chose four classes to answer the questionnaire and interviewed ten teachers. By doing so, the author discovered students’ attitudes towards teacher questioning, how the teachers employ the questioning in their classes, and what problems arose by teacher questioning. Finally, the author recommended specific suggestions on preparation for questioning、design for questioning and controls for questioning, and also proposed some requirements to optimize the English Reading class. In the long run, the author hopes that teachers use questioning as an effective form of interaction so as to improve the quality of English reading classes.