A Study On Teacher Questioning For Developing Students’ Thinking Quality In Senior High School English Reading Class

With the acceleration of globalization,English teaching has become increasingly important.The "English Core Competence" mentioned in the National English Curriculum Standards for Ordinary High School published in 2017 has become the research focus of educators and researchers.Developing students’ thinking quality,as an important and necessary part in English class teaching,catches more and more attention.In English reading classes,teacher’ questioning plays a very critical role in developing students’ thinking quality.It can get the agility and flexibility of students’ thinking trained,improve students’ complex thinking,and encourage students’ critical and creative thinking.Some scholars have done research on thinking qualities,like critical and creative thinking.Some other studies concerned teacher’s questioning,including studies on comparing the class questioning of teacher’s and student’s preference,analyzing and evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of teacher’s questioning.Though there are lots of studies in these two fields,few studies connect teacher’s questioning and student’s thinking quality,so it is pretty necessary to do further study on teacher’s questioning in terms of cultivating students’ thinking quality.This study aims to figure out the current situation of teacher’s questioning,including the distribution of teacher’s questioning strategies in English reading class,also questions in terms of developing students’ thinking quality.Moreover,this thesis is going to find out the major factors that influence teacher’s questioning on improving students’ thinking quality,with the hope of providing some theoretical and practical suggestions on developing students’ thinking quality more efficient.For the sake of investigating the distribution of the distribution of teacher’s questioning strategies and the current situation of teacher’s questioning in terms of cultivating students’ thinking quality in English reading classes,twenty English reading lessons were firstly recorded and then transcribed in the process of conducting this research,and the current situation is analyzed based on Bloom’s classification of questions.Finally,some personal teacher’s interviews were conducted with 5 English teachers so as to get some conflicting and confusing results classified from the questionnaire data and searching for more efficient and extensive information.Based on Krashen’s input hypothesis,Long’s interaction hypothesis and Swain’s output hypothesis,as well as the previous studies on teacher questioning in English reading class,this research was conducted by using questionnaire,recordings,classroom observation and teacher’s personal interview.Firstly,the questionnaires and classroom observation sheet were designed.Besides,the research chooses to observe four classes and two teachers.Meanwhile,the interviews are based on these two teachers in the four classes after class.All data were collected,sorted out,quantified and then analyzed through the Excel and SPSS.Finally,after discussing,analyzing the data,the conclusion comes into existence.Major findings are as follows: 1)There are some preferences in questioning type and wait time,as well as differences in answering way,distribution of questions,teacher’s feedback and questioning strategy.2)It seems in English reading class teacher’s questioning can develop all levels of thinking,but there is an apparent lack of high order thinking questions obviously.As for all the thinking qualities,the one that relatively emphasized is criticalness,and the one that not emphasized much is complexity.3)For the sake of training their questioning skills on developing students’ thinking quality,face-to-face training on weekdays in other cities is most teachers’ best choice,in which teachers could observe many great lessons taught by superior and expert teachers.They could also discuss with other teachers and gain guidance from experts,thus teachers interviewed are quite passionate for the ways of intensive face-to-face training on weekdays in other cities.In view of the findings,some suggestions are put forth on how to develop teacher’s questioning skills thus developing students’ thinking quality much more effectively and comprehensively.On the basis of the findings,this thesis can hopefully provide some efficient assistance and useful points on developing students’ thinking quality as well as improving their language competencies.What’s more,this study hopes to supply some good inspiration and prospects on this aspect and for other further studies.