A Comparative Study On The Level Of Questioning In Reading Classroom Between Novice And Experienced English Teachers In Senior High Schools

As The New English Curriculum Standards for High Schools(Ministry of Education,2017)advances the core qualities for students,cultivation of students' thinking quality becomes,increasingly,one of the most important concerns for English teachers in senior high school.Therefore,classroom questioning,as an important part of English reading instruction,if well designed,can arouse students' reading curiosity and interest,and motivate them to participate actively in class activities,thus improving their reading ability and developing their higher thinking ability.According to the cognitive taxonomic model developed by Bloom(1956),the questions teachers ask fall into six types as knowledge,comprehension,application,analysis,synthesis and evaluation.Among them,the types of knowledge and comprehension are considered to be at lower level,while the other four are at higher level,and different levels of question have different functions.As such,teachers,who intend to achieve effective English reading instruction,are required to allocate,properly,each level of questions when developing questions of all levels.In our teaching practice,however,there still exist many problems in question design.For example,as noted by researchers,teachers frequently pose questions that require lower level thinking instead of higher level thinking,which will undoubtedly affect the efficiency of the reading instruction.In view of the above situation,this study,based on Bloom's cognitive taxonomic model and the relevant research findings about the different levels of classroom questioning home and abroad and guided by the theories of Zone of Proximal Development and Interaction Hypothesis,attempted to compare the distribution of different questioning levels in reading instruction between novice and proficient English teachers in senior high schools.Twenty teachers,including ten novice teachers and ten proficient teachers,who participated in the study,were from two senior high schools in urban areas of XX City,Shandong Province.Quantitative and qualitative data were collected by means of questionnaire,classroom observation and interview,and analyzed according to Bloom's cognitive taxonomy.The results showed:(1)Novice English teachers posed much lower level questions;(2)Proficient English teachers could use each level of questions more flexibly.As a result,the distribution of the different questioning level posed by proficient teachers is more conductive in cultivating students' thinking quality than those by novice teachers;(3)Both groups,in fact,had some shortcomings in designing questions and didn't attach enough attention to the application and evaluation questions;(4)There are three influence factors that result in the different distribution of question level posed by novice and proficient English teachers.They are teachers' cognitivelevel on classroom questioning,the treatment of each level of question,and the emphasis on college entrance examination.Based on this,the study suggested that on the one hand,novice teachers should deepen their understanding of the classroom questioning and consciously increase the number of the higher level questions at the same time.On the other hand,both novice teachers and proficient teachers should reflect on their classroom questioning design more actively,moreover,both groups should place more emphasis on application and evaluation questions,and all questions should be close to text as well.Of course,there,unavoidably,existed some deficiencies in the research due to the constraints of time and condition.For instance,the number of the subjects in the survey was small,and was not authoritative enough to represent all the English teachers;the classroom observation procedure was not so well considered that there must be omissions of some important information.But,generally speaking,the study has achieved the expected goals and the results are rather satisfactory,having provided some of beneficial suggestions and practical basis for English teachers to pose questions of different level more properly and has also laid a rather solid foundation for further research to design efficient questions in reading instruction for senior high school.