| The English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High School(2017 edition 2020 revision)puts the concept of thinking quality into the core literacy training goal of English subject,in which critical thinking is an important connotation of the core literacy of English subject.Critical thinking,as a basic skill to solve problems,occupies a very important position in reading teaching.It requires readers to analyze,doubt,and evaluate the information in the article and put forward their own opinions in the process of reading.That is why this research focuses on reading class.How to cultivate students’ critical thinking in English teaching has become the focus of attention of educational researchers and teachers at home and abroad.Previous studies have shown that teacher questioning plays a very important role in English reading class.Therefore,this study focuses on senior high school English reading teachers’ questioning,and aims to study the current situation of English teachers’ questions from the perspective of critical thinking.As the most commonly used way of interaction between students and teachers in English classroom,teacher questioning plays an important role in arousing students’ interest,promoting students’ interaction,checking students’ understanding,and organizing teaching.However,few researchers discuss all aspects of teachers’ questioning from the perspective of critical thinking.Therefore,this study takes the critical thinking perspective as the starting point,based on the senior high school English reading class,to study the English teacher questioning.Using classroom observation,questionnaire survey and interview as research methods,the author took 240 students and 30 English teachers as the research subjects in a senior high school in Hohhot,and investigated four classes,two liberal arts classes and two science classes.And eight teachers were observed in class,and four teachers were interviewed.This paper mainly investigates the current situation of teachers’ questioning and critical thinking cultivation in senior high school English reading class.In addition,it conducts an in-depth analysis of questions involving the cultivation of critical thinking in terms of the types of questions,the strategies of questions,and the ways of answering questions,and explores its characteristics.This research mainly explores the following three questions : 1.What is the teacher’s perception of cultivating student’s critical thinking by teacher questioning in English reading class? 2.What is the current situation of teacher questioning in cultivating students’ critical thinking skills in English reading class? 3.What are the characteristics of teachers’ questioning which aim to cultivate critical thinking skills?Through the data collection of questionnaires and classroom observations,Excel and SPSS23 were used to analyze the questionnaire data and interviews with four teachers were conducted.It mainly investigates the current situation of teachers’ questioning and critical thinking training in senior high school English reading teaching.Through the data collection of questionnaires,classroom observations and interviews,and the analysis of questionnaire data using Excel and SPSS23,it is found that teachers have realized the importance and feasibility of cultivating student’s critical thinking through teacher.But in the actual classroom,the quantity and quality of questions of critical thinking skills are small and not very high.Pointing to six critical thinking sub-skills,the results show that the mean of teacher’s questions asked,from the high to low is:inference-interpretation-analysis-explanation-evaluation-self-regulation.In cultivating student’s critical thinking,probing is the most commonly used questioning strategy;teachers nominate students to answer questions as the most commonly used question response way;in terms of question content,the proportion of literal comprehension questions is the largest.Teachers should try to improve their professional quality,learn to design different types of questions and use the strategies of teachers’ questioning in order to promote the cultivation of students’ critical thinking.Teachers can also guide students to ask questions and answer by themselves,and provide students with more opportunities to communicate with each other to stimulate students’ critical thinking.Based on the above research findings,the author of this paper gets some implication on teacher questioning of senior high school English class,and also puts forward some suggestions for future research.The author hopes that this study can arouse the attention of senior high school English teachers to cultivate students’ critical thinking and think about how to use appropriate questions more efficiently to guide students to think critically. |
