A Survey On Students' Questioning In English Major's Comprehensive English Class

As the era of knowledge economics comes,cultivating creative talents required for our society has become the core of quality education,and daring to question is a primary trait of creative talents.Students' questioning,an exploratory way to figure out solutions of problems,is beneficial to develop students' thinking ability and promote them to explore and solve problems independently and actively.Therefore,this study attempts to investigate the overall situation of students'questioning and the factors affecting their questioning in Comprehensive English class.Later,some advice will be provided to settle problems according to the results.This study is based on Constructivism and Interaction Hypothesis.Questionnaire,interview and classroom observation have been adopted to investigate the 183 English major students.At first,the questionnaire which has sufficient validity and reliability is revised on the basis of Doctor Si Chengyong's and Mo Wenqing's questionnaire.The questionnaire contains two parts:the first part is to master the overall situation of students' questioning in Comprehensive English class,including five dimensions:awareness of students' questioning,attitude of students' questioning,types of students' questioning,ability of students' questioning and ways of students' questioning;the second part is intended to figure out factors affecting students' questioning in Comprehensive English class.In addition,interview is used to acquire the attitude of both teachers and students toward students'questioning and factors affecting students' questioning.Furthermore,classroom observation aims to find the general situation and affecting factors of students' questioning,such as the quality,type,teachers' behaviors and so on.In summary,the collaboration of the three methods promoting and proving each other mutually attempts to answer the two questions:(1)What is the overall situation of students5 questioning in Comprehensive English class like?(2)What are the factors affecting students' questioning in Comprehensive English class?According to the results,the main findings are stated as follows:(1)The overall situation is not very satisfying.Although most of the students think highly of the behavior of students' questioning,they seldom raise questions.Students' questioning ability has not reached the middle level.Besides,the types of students' questioning are mostly about the structures or meanings of some complicated sentences in the textbook.Moreover,more than half of the students prefer to pose questions during team work in Comprehensive English class.(2)Regarding to the factors affecting students'questioning,it can be divided into three categories:teaching material,student factors and teacher factors.To be more specific,the topic,interest,difficulty,the relation with real life of teaching material,the previewing habit and learning achievement of students and the attitude,teaching methods,feedback and so on of the teachers all have influence on students' questioning in Comprehensive English class.Based on these findings,some suggestions are put forward for teachers:(1)selecting and adapting teaching materials scientifically;(2)giving positive feedback to students after their questioning;(3)enriching teaching methods and emphasizing cooperative learning;(4)creating a harmony atmosphere and setting up a questioning part for students.And for students,they should:(1)update the conceptions of learning;(2)cultivate the habit of previewing;(3)improve the ability to produce and raise questions.However,because of time limitation and the author's personal ability,the representativeness of this study is not satisfying,which should be improved in future studies by carrying out resear-ches with more subjects,time and adopting more methods to investigate,such as Action Research.