A Study Of Questioning In High School English Class From The Perspective Of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking,as one part of thinking quality,is stated in the English Curriculum Standard for Senior High（2017）,which are of common concern from home and abroad.How to cultivate it in English class has become a focus of theoreticians and teachers.In light of the Interaction Hypothesis and the Art of Socratic Questioning,this study intends to investigate the current status quo of classroom questioning.It intends to address the following three research questions:1)What is the distribution of classroom questions towards different critical thinking（CT）skills?2)What are the characteristics of questioning towards CT cultivation?3)What is the influence of discourse patterns on CT cultivation?The subjects are composed of 15 lessons chosen from the 11^thNational English Class Competition of Senior High.Classroom observation was mainly employed in the study.The lessons were transcribed,and the information about question types,discourse patterns and questioning techniques were coded and later were quantified,counted and calculated in Excel.After analyzing the data,this thesis drew the following conclusions:a.Emphasis on critical thinking has increased,but attention for different critical thinking skills varied greatly.b.Teachers had the awareness of using questioning techniques such as questioning strategy,ways of response and waiting time,but lack flexibility and efficiency.The awareness of cultivating students’questioning ability was also insufficient.c.Discourse patterns,to a certain degree,affect the strength of CT cultivation and have certain inclination to different CT skills.According to the relative main findings,the author provides some pedagogic suggestions on question types,questioning techniques and discourse patterns,so as to help teachers more comprehensively and more effectively cultivate students’critical thinking skills.From the perspective of curriculum development,the author suggests that critical thinking should be included in the professional training for teachers and evaluation standards for students.There inevitably existed some shortcomings such as the limited samples and monotonous research method.The author hopes the further studies get over the shortcomings and have further findings.