A Study Of The Impacts Of English Teachers’ Cognition Of The Revised Taxonomy Of Educational Objectives On Question Design In Junior Middle School

With further implementation of key competency of English subject,cultivation and promotion of students’ thinking quality has aroused great concern.Thinking quality and reading instruction are closely related.Meanwhile,teacher question plays a crucial role in activating students’ thinking.But so far there are still certain problems in teachers’ question design in junior middle school English reading classes.For instance,questions are mainly confined to be at the surface and lower cognitive level,and question design is less thinking-quality-oriented.Therefore,this study intends to investigate middle school English teachers’ cognition of the revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and its impacts on question design,hoping to provide teachers with more reference resources about question design to improve their capability of designing questions to get to the core of promoting students’ thinking quality under the guidance of the revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.Based on the revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives,taking 216 junior middle school English teachers as the research subjects of the questionnaire and 4 of them as the subjects of classroom observation and interview,this thesis attempts to explore the answers to the following three questions : 1)What’s junior middle school English teachers’ cognition of applying the revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives to question design in English reading instruction? 2)What are the category and level of teacher question in junior middle school English reading instruction? 3)What are the impacts of English teachers’ cognition of applying the revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives on question design in reading instruction?Results are as follows:(1)Junior middle school English teachers’ cognition of applying the revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives to question design in reading instruction is generally high,with 78.28% of the teachers surveyed claim that they do so.(2)More display questions and referential questions are designed while evaluative questions are rarely adopted with the ratio of 76.04%,16.93% and 7.03% respectively.As for the levels,the number of teacher question at evaluating level and creating level is generally rare,which indicates that more questions at higher cognitive levels need to be improved.(3)This study indicates that English teachers’ cognition of the revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives generally exerts positive impacts on question design at lower cognitive levels,while its impacts on questions of higher cognitive levels are still weak and need to be further enhanced.Teachers have rather strong awareness of designing hierarchical questions,but questions of lower cognitive levels obviously far outweigh.Based on results,two suggestions are put forward,that is,to further enhance English teachers’ cognition of applying the revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives to guide their question design and to pay close attention to the hierarchical distribution of teacher question.The study bears certain significance.Theoretically,this thesis is a case of empirical study which enriches relevant research on hierarchical question design in junior middle school English reading instruction based on the revised Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.Practically,this study can help improve their awareness and ability of hierarchical question design so as to realize the goal of promoting students’ thinking quality.