Questioning Skills In Senior High School English Reading Classroom

Reading is an important way for students to gain various kinds of information and knowledge. New English Curriculum Standards for General High School(2003) holds that the primary goal of English reading teaching is to help students develop their critical reading competence. Questioning accounts for a large proportion of English reading classes and it is the bridge to fill the information gap between teachers and students. It is believed that effective questioning can reflect teachers’ ability to reorganize and reprobe the reading material, and help teachers know students’ understanding of the reading material and cultivate their critical thinking so as to improve their reading ability.Under the guidance of constructivism learning theory and the theory of critical discourse analysis, the thesis attempts an analysis of the characteristics and of the relationship between questioning and critical thinking through classroom observations and interviews. Some suggestions are expected to be put forward so as to improve critical questioning so as to cultivate students’ critical thinking more efficiently in reading classes.Six English teachers are involved in this study. They teach students in the same grade in Zelin high school-- an ordinary senior high school of Ezhou City. Through classroom observations and data analysis, the author finds that: 1. There still exists misunderstanding of the concept of critical reading teaching, so they just pose questions to lead students to give different views on the content of the text. Some teachers even emphasize the opposite opinion to the writer; 2. Questioning fragmentation in PWP Mode has a bad effect on developing students’ critical thinking ability. Teachers raise questions respectively according to each part without considering the connections among three parts, which forms the tendency of information fragmentations during students’ reading process; 3.Yes-no questions and textual questions take up much time. Most of the answers to these questions can be found out directly from the reading materials. Therefore students lose interests or have no motivation to answer these questions, which can not stimulate students’ critical thinking effectively; 4. Questioning models are simplex, that is to say,students seldom get the opportunities to raise their own questions in reading classes.Teachers can not offer various questioning models, so there is an atmosphere of great tension in classroom communication.The results of the study illustrate that questioning attaches great significance to cultivating students’ critical reading comprehension ability. First, teachers should guide students to notice different writing styles so that students can read from a critical perspective. Second, teachers should arrange proper questions of different levels based on the expanding information from the text and gradually cultivate students’ critical reading competence. The new knowledge should be taught on the basis of students previous knowledge. Third, students can generate questions from the questions that teacher raised in reading class to help students master the method of critical reading. Teachers should stimulate students to raise questions autonomously, which is of great importance to the improvement of students’ critical thinking.