An Investigation Into Teacher Questions In Middle School English Reading:From Cognitive Thinking Perspective

The New English Curriculum Standards put forward that our present English Education should spare no effort to develop students’ abilities to gain and possess information, to analyze and solve problems, and to think critically. Therefore, developing students’ higher order thinking ability in English education is becoming urgent. After scanning research about how teachers develop students’ higher order thinking ability through reading questions in reading context, I find that most of them are theoretical introduction and experience sharing. Seldom have I seen empirical studies. Bloom classifies human cognition into six levels according to its complexities: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The last three levels belong to higher order thinking skills. This thesis regards the taxonomy as theoretical background, chooses the article John Snow Defeats King Cholera from Senior English, Book5 as basic reading material, and analyzes the cognitive levels and their developmental trend towards reading questions in English teachers’ lesson plans. The research tries to answer the following three main questions:1.How are reading questions designed by middle school English teachers distributed in terms of cognitive levels?2.What are the respective characteristics of teacher questions in pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading?3. What’s the dynamic developmental trend of their cognitive levels?Enough reading-based questions are collected from middle school English teachers’ lesson plans. Every question is classified according to Bloom’s taxonomy. Then I calculate and analyze their cognitive levels to get the following research results:1.On the whole, the ratio of higher order thinking questions and lower order thinking questions is close to 2:8 when middle school English teachers design reading questions. Questions for comprehension take up the largest proportion. Questions for knowledge come next. Questions for application and analysis rank the third with almost the same number. Questions for synthesis and evaluation take up the least proportion.2.Those reading questions are analyzed according to different stages. In pre-reading, the ratio of higher order thinking questions and lower order thinking questions is close to 1:24. They mainly aim at knowledge and then comprehension. They center more on leading in the text background and predicting the content. In while-reading, the ratio of higher order thinking questions and lower order thinking questions is close to 1:9. They are mainly for comprehension. They focus more on understanding the detailed information and summarizing the main idea. In post-reading, the ratio of higher order thinking questions and lower order thinking questions is close to 3:7. Compared with previous two stages, the proportion of higher order thinking questions has a sharp increase. They focus more on transferring knowledge, analyzing material, and evaluating characters.3.With the advancing of teaching procedures, the number of lower order thinking questions increases in while-reading but then retreat in post-reading. However, the number of higher order thinking questions, especially synthesis questions and evaluation questions, doesn’t retreat back in post-reading after it increases in while-reading. Then I analyze individual teacher’s questions in lesson plan and find that their developmental trend of cognitive levels shows a wavy trend, which can be divided into three patterns:a. Wave on the rise. The cognitive level of ending question is higher than that of initial question, b. Wave of equal. The cognitive level of ending question is equal to that of initial question. c. Wave in the decrease. The cognitive level of ending question is lower than that of initial question.Based on the research, middle school English teachers should design more higher order thinking questions and compress the number of lower order thinking questions appropriately, especially in while-reading. At the same time they should improve the quality and coherence of lower order thinking questions. As for different reading stages, English teachers had better present questions based on their respective characteristics. Questions should be arranged according to the pattern of wave on the rise to better promote students’ cognitive development.