A Study On The Teachers’ Design Of Classroom Questions For The Cultivation Of Students’ Thinking Capacity In Middle School English Text Teaching

The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022)clearly proposes that English teachers should cultivate students’ key competencies.The thinking capacity is one of the four key competencies,including logical thinking,dialectical thinking and creative thinking.As a common teaching method,classroom questioning can cultivate students’ thinking capacity.Therefore,based on the latest requirements of the cultivation of thinking capacity,this research studies the teachers’ classroom questioning in junior high school reading classes.Based on the theory of text analysis,Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives and key competencies,this study conducts classroom observations with 20 English teachers and a questionnaire survey among 477 students in Grade 8 and 9 in Nanning X Middle School.And it mainly focuses on the following questions:(1)In text teaching,which dimension of text analysis is involved in teacher’s questioning?(2)In text teaching,which level of thinking do teachers tend to design questions for?(3)What are the students’ views and expectations on teachers’ questioning?Through analyzing the collected data,this study has got the following findings.(1)Among the text-related questions,teachers’ classroom questions are less concerned with the “why” and “how” dimensions of text analysis,but more concerned with the “what” dimension.This shows that the teachers are more inclined to ask questions that can enable students to acquire the surface knowledge of the text than to ask questions that can enable students to explore the deep meaning of the text.(2)In text teaching,the “induction and inference” questions count the most followed by the “observation and discrimination” questions while the “criticism and innovation” questions count the least.This shows that teachers tend to cultivate students’ thinking capacity in the middle level and ignore cultivating the thinking capacity in the high level.(3)Students do not like open questions.They prefer questions that can be answered directly from the details of the text.Based on the above findings,this study puts forward the following pedagogical suggestions:(1)Teachers should cultivate students’ high-level thinking capacity by designing more “why” and “how” questions based on the text.(2)Teachers should study the English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022)to increase the proportion of criticism and innovation questions in reading class.(3)Teachers should design open questions by combining text with students’ real life and other subjects.