On Questioning Strategies For Senior High School Students' Thinking Abilities Cultivation In English Reading Teaching

The research is to figure out the present situation of thinking ability cultivation by analyzing the classroom questions in reading lessons of senior high school. The thinking ability cultivation includes the following three aspects:logical, critical and creative thinking ability cultivation. The 195 questions come from 10 English reading-teaching lessons in a certain senior high school. And the reading materials are from Module 1 and Module 5 published by the People's Education Press. This research analyzes the collected questions. The analyses are as follows:Firstly, there are 3 main phases in the reading lesson:open-ended questions in pre-reading phase, close-ended in while-reading, and the disposable open-ended in post-reading.Secondly, questions aiming at cultivating logical, critical and creative thinking ability are presented in present classroom questioning but in different periodicity. The first one is widely-presented and mainly in while-reading phase. The second and the last one are commonly adopted in pre-reading and post-reading phase but with little involvement.Thirdly, questions aiming at logical thinking cultivation embody the content of the passage and the functions to improve students' reading skills and their understanding of the passage; questions for critical creative thinking ability cultivation are the tool for leading-in and extra discussion.The possible reasons for the above situations could be as follows:the rigid teaching method, the lack of originality of questions, the fixed teaching schedule, the limited reading material and the single-styled examination. These possible reasons are related to varied groups of people. Therefore, this research can only focus on the group of teacher and makes suggestions on question design.This research comes up with the following questioning design suggestions:Firstly, to design questions for the logical thinking ability cultivation, teachers could focus on these six spectrums:the key words of passage, the logic of the passage, information gap inference, the opinion and motive of author, the conclusion of passage, and the source of passage. Secondly, similar to the former one, to design questions aiming at critical thinking ability cultivation, teachers might consider from the following aspects:key words of the reading material, the relationship between the title and the passage, the gist and the attitude of the author, the plots and the source of the reading material. Thirdly, to conceit questions for the creative thinking ability cultivation, teachers could concentrate on the types of questions which can be divided into the brain-storming type, condition-limited type, empathetic type, analogy/metaphor type, and end-adding type.