Exploring The Influence Of Cognitive Levels Of Classroom Questioning On The Cultivation Of Students’ Thinking Quality In Senior High School English Reading

According to the National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(The Ministry of Education,2018),the core competences of English include language ability,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning ability.Thinking quality refers to the ability and level of thinking in logic,criticism and innovation.English reading class is an important position for cultivating the thinking quality of high school students,especially the higher-order thinking.In teaching English reading,questioning is the scaffolding that inspires students to think about reading,which teachers can use as an important carrier to pilot students to develop their thinking to a higher level.This study applies Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives to teaching English reading,aiming to explore two questions: 1.Which cognitive levels are the main focuses of teachers’ questions in senior high English reading class? 2.What’s the influence of classroom questioning at different levels on the cultivation of students’ thinking quality?The study is guided by Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives in cognitive domain,adopting literature analysis,questionnaire,interview and comparative experiment,so as to test whether the cognitive levels of questioning in teaching English reading in senior high school can influence the cultivation of students’ thinking quality.The major findings are as follows: 1.In senior high school English reading class,most teachers’ questions are limited to the first three lower levels of remembering,understanding,and applying,while paying less attention to the three higher-level goals of analyzing,evaluating and creating.2.After the hierarchical questioning guided by Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives in cognitive domain,the English reading performance of the experimental group is higher than that of the control group.And through comparison,the two levels of evaluating and creating have improved the most.Therefore,it is concluded that teacher’s hierarchical questioning in English reading class makes a positive effect on the cultivation of students’ thinking quality.This study suggests that English teachers should start from the cognitive rules of students when designing questions,consider whether the questions have a certain level of thinking,and carefully set up questions with gradients.Teachers can also use question chains to guide students to capture and understand the deep information hidden between the lines.Learning and thinking by questioning will lead students’ thinking to develop steadily from low-level to high-level.