A Case Study On The Teacher Questioning In English Reading Class In Junior High School

Questioning is a common teaching technique used by teachers in classrooms,and also the basic form of interactions between teachers and students.In English reading class in junior high school,whether teachers can reasonably apply questioning influences the teaching effect to a certain extent.Therefore,it is necessary to do research on the teacher questioning in English reading class in junior high school to optimize teachers' use of questioning so as to improve the teaching effect.Based on Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive domain and Zone of Proximal Development(ZPD)theory,this study takes six question types including knowledge,comprehension,application,analysis,synthesis and evaluation,and six questioning strategies including repeating,translating,rephrasing,redirecting,prompting and probing as the research framework to investigate the teacher's use of question types and questioning strategies in English reading class.The subjects were an English teacher and 55 students in Class Five,Grade Eight in X Junior High School in Nanning.The instruments used in this study were classroom observation,questionnaire and interview.Four questions are discussed: 1.What are the frequencies of different question types used by the teacher? 2.What questioning strategies does the teacher use?3.What are the factors that influence the teacher's use of question types and questioning strategies? 4.What are students' expectations on question types and questioning strategies used by the teacher?The findings are as follows: Firstly,the teacher preferred to ask lower-cognitivelevel questions and comprehension questions were most frequently used.Secondly,the teacher's use of questioning strategies seldom changed,mainly focusing on redirecting strategy.Thirdly,the teacher designed and asked questions according to English reading comprehension questions in senior high school entrance examination,and English proficiency levels of most students.The teacher did not pay attention to the design and implementation of questions with different cognitive levels.Besides,to catch up with the teaching progress,the teacher rarely applied different questioning strategies,such as prompting,probing and rephrasing,to guide students to think andanswer questions while redirecting,translating and repeating were easy for the teacher to use in limited class time.Fourthly,most students expected the teacher to ask comprehension and knowledge questions,and some students also expected the teacher to ask higher-cognitive-level questions.Meanwhile,students expected the teacher to use different questioning strategies,especially prompting.According to the results,the following suggestions are provided for teachers:acquiring the relevant knowledge of questioning,paying attention to students' ZPD,properly posing questions with different cognitive levels,and flexibly using questioning strategies.