A Comparative Study Of Classroom Questioning Between Novice Teachers And Experienced Teachers In Senior English Reading Class

Classroom questioning is an indispensable means of classroom teaching.It is an important way for teachers and students to communicate ideas and emotions during the teaching process.It is an essential part of classroom teaching and a significant source of language input for learners.Basing on the research of classroom questioning at home and abroad,and Krashen’s Input Hypothesis,Long?s interacion theory and Swain’s comprehensible output hypothesis,the author attempts to explore the similarities and differences in classroom questioning behaviors between experienced teachers and novice teachers.This study tries to answer the following questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences between the experienced teachers and the novice teachers in question design,questioning types,questioning strategies,answer ways,and wait time in English reading teaching?(2)What are the differences between teachers’ classroom questioning behavior and students’ expectations on teachers’ questioning? Finally,the author proposes some suggestions on how to improve classroom questioning.In this study,the author chooses three experienced teachers,three novice teachers and 480 students from Pingnan Middle School and Pingnan Town Middle School in Guigang as the research subjects.The research subjects are from two normal senior high schools.Class observation,questionnaire,and interviews were employed as research instruments.The conclusion is drawn as follows: 1.The novice teachers and experienced teachers have some common aspects in classroom questioning;Both of them prefer to use display questions.Both of them can use different questioning strategies;In terms of waiting time,both types of teachers’ waiting time for students is too short to meet the students’ language acquisition requirements.2.There are also differences between experienced teachers and novice teachers in the classroom questioning as follows:(1)In the reading class,experienced teachers can reasonably design referential questions and display questions based on the contents and difficulty of reading passages than novice teachers.(2)In the use of questioning strategies,experienced teachers are better at using exploring and probing strategies,while novice teachers use more repetition and simplification strategies.(3)At the point of waiting time,experienced teachers give students a little more time to prepare their answers.(4)In terms of teachers? feedback,the experienced teachers can give different degrees of affirmation and corresponding incentives while the novice teachers are monotonous,simple praise.(5)The experienced teachers spend more time on teaching reflection than novice teachers.3.Students’ expectations for teachers’ classroom questions are as follows:(1)For the different questioning types,the students are more inclined to display questions;(2)As for questioning strategies,they expect their teachers to use repetition and simplification strategies;(3)They also hope that teachers can give them more waiting time.(4)In terms of teachers’ feedback,students prefer to get positive feedback from teachers.Finally,the author would like to propose some suggestions for improving classroom questioning to senior high school teachers for their reference.Due to limited conditions and the limitations of the author’s research capabilities,this thesis has certain shortcomings.First of all,the amount of class hours observed in the classroom is too small.Six participants participated in the study,including three novice teachers and three experienced teachers.The author only observed one lesson of each teacher.One class could not represent the teacher’s true level of teaching.It is suggested that future researches should increase classroom observations to study classroom questioning.Secondly,considering the present study is just a case study between three experienced teachers and three novice teachers,the above results may be affected by such factors such as teaching materials,the teachers? teaching style and the students? cognitive levels.Therefore,it is difficult to reflect the overall situation of classroom questioning.Thirdly,the time of investigation is too short to collect more adequate data.In future studies,more time and more subjects should be involved.