A Study Of The English Teachers’ Classroom Questioning Strategies And Their Scaffolding Functions In The Senior High School

Teachers’ questioning strategy is one of the most important dimensions in the teaching process,and it is also one of the important strategies for teachers to organize students’ learning.At the same time,teachers’ questioning acts on students’ proximal development zone(ZPD),which is considered as one of the important ways of teachers’ scaffolding strategy.The effectiveness of questioning depends largely on the use of questioning strategies,and effective classroom questioning helps to promote the development of students’ cognition and improve students’ classroom participation.Through literature review,the author finds that most of the research on questioning strategies is to explore what different effective questioning strategies English teachers should adopt under different teaching needs,but there is little research on scaffolding functions of English teachers’ using questioning strategies.In addition,from the existing research,it can be found that there are some problems in teachers’ using different questioning strategies in class,which have not played a good scaffolding functions for students’ cognitive,linguistic and affective development.Meanwhile,teachers’ questioning is one of the ways of classroom interaction.Teachers and students,as classroom subjects,their views on questioning strategies also affect the effect of classroom interaction to some extent.Therefore,based on comprehensible input hypothesis,output hypothesis and interaction hypothesis,this thesis tries to answer the following three questions by combining qualitative and quantitative research methods:1.What is the current situation of the use of English teachers’ classroom questioning strategies in the senior high school?2.What are the views of English teachers and students on different classroom questioning strategies in the senior high school?3.What are the scaffolding functions of classroom questioning strategies used by English teachers for students’ development in the senior high school?In order to address the above research questions,four senior English teachers and their students from Jintang Middle School were selected for this study and their 40 lessons,10 lessons per teacher and 40 minutes per lesson,were observed.The author used the classification standard of Wang(2002)to analyze the teachers’ questioning strategies,and used the six specific scaffolding functions in the cognitive and affective development dimensions proposed by Wood et al.(1976),as well as the linguistic development dimensions of language input and output to analyze the scaffolding functions embodied in the questioning strategies used by teachers.The results are as follows: First,all four teachers design questions according to the teaching objectives before class,and tend to design questions related to students’ lives.Then teachers use mostly simplifying and probing strategies to stimulate students to express more in the process of questioning;teachers give priority to positive feedback,but the content is relatively simple.Second,all four teachers indicate to some extent that the use of design strategies should focus not only on the content but also on the purpose of questioning,and they also acknowledge the positive effects of using a variety of control and evaluation strategies during questioning to organize classroom activities and promote students’ participation.In addition,most students agree that teachers reduce their anxiety about answering questions by simplifying,changing the questioning style and increasing the waiting time.Also,students are more likely to expect encouraging comments on their responses.Third,teachers’ different questioning strategies play different roles in students’ linguistic,cognitive and affective development,which is reflected in the improvement of the input and output of the target language,the expansion of the depth and breadth of students’ thinking and the stimulation of students’ interest in English learning.By studying the questioning strategies of senior high school English teachers and their scaffolding functions,the author intended to provide some implications for senior high school English teachers according to the research results: First of all,English teachers can use different questioning strategies by referring to the scaffolding functions of different questioning strategies,so as to enhance the pertinence and flexibility of questioning strategies.In addition,teachers should reasonably adjust questioning strategies according to students’ learning needs.Finally,teachers should take the scaffolding functions of using questioning strategies in class as one of the contents of after-class reflection.