A Study Of Teachers’ Question Types Towards Thinking Quality In Middle School English Reading Teaching

National English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education（2022 edition）（hereinafter NEC）takes developing students’thinking quality as one of the essential objectives in compulsory English education,demanding students to develop logical thinking,critical thinking,and creative thinking.Teacher questioning in English reading teaching plays a vital role in the cultivation of students’thinking quality.Therefore,it is of practical significance to study teachers’questions from the perspective of thinking quality in middle school English reading classes.Based on the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy and NEC thinking quality objectives taxonomy,this research has taken 21 reading classes in the 13^th National English Teaching Observation Seminar of Junior High School as the data and adopted classroom observation and conversation analysis to address three research questions:（1）According to the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy,what distribution features can be found with teachers’question types in middle school English reading classes?（2）What characteristics of thinking quality are demonstrated in the students’responses?（3）What corresponding relations can be found between students’thinking quality performance and teachers’question types?The findings are as follows.（1）In the chosen 21 reading classes,there were 497questions raised by the teachers.The six categories of questions were covered,though with uneven distribution.Low-level cognitive questions occurred 389 times,occupying79%,while high-level cognitive questions appeared 108 times,accounting for 21%,which indicates there were much more low-level cognitive questions than high-level cognitive questions.In terms of frequency,understanding questions ranked first（262times,53%）,followed by remembering questions（123 times,25%）,analyzing questions（56 times,11%）,evaluating questions（32 times,6%）,creating questions（20times,4%）and applying questions（4 times,1%）.（2）Thinking quality of“summarization and inference”was demonstrated in the students’responses most frequently（103 times,47.0%）,mainly to“summarize the main idea of the text”and“infer the characters’mentality and motivation”.“Criticalness and creativity”ranked second（60 times,27.4%）,with students to“evaluate the content of the text”and“adapt or recreate the text”.“Observation and analysis”ranked third（56 times,25.6%）with the main characteristics to“find out the development of the event in the text”and“consider matters and analyze problems dialectically”.（3）Students’thinking quality of“observation and analysis”was mainly elicited by understanding questions,analyzing questions,and evaluating questions.“Summarization and inference”was mainly triggered by understanding questions,analyzing questions,applying questions,and remembering questions,while“criticalness and creativity”was mainly by evaluating questions and creating questions.Based on the above findings,implications for teacher questioning in middle school English reading classes are presented as follows.Firstly,teachers should identify the purposes of questions,properly reduce the proportion of low-level cognitive question types and enlarge that of high-level cognitive question types.Secondly,teachers should offer students more opportunities to respond to questions,and pay attention to students’thinking quality performance in classes.Thirdly,teachers should make full use of the six question types to trigger students’different thinking quality.