A Study On Teacher Questioning In Junior High School High-quality English Listening And Speaking Classes

In listening and speaking class,questioning is a vital link and the most frequent interaction between teachers and students.High-quality questions can test students’ learning efficiency,arouse their interest in learning,help them better understand knowledge,and inspire them to think independently.Teachers and scholars have attached great importance to classroom questioning in recent years.Previous researches have focused on classroom questioning in reading classes,which has resulted in an uneven distribution of research findings and is not conducive to comprehensive guidance for improving teachers’ questioning.Therefore,this study focus on the listening and speaking English class.It uses the videos of eight outstanding teachers’ listening and speaking lessons in the 12 th National Middle School English Demonstration Teaching in 2017 as the corpus.It analyzes and studies the teachers’ questioning discourse in the class,which has positive implications for improving the quality of junior high school English teaching.By observing,transcribing,and analyzing the interaction between teachers questioning and students in the classroom,based on the existing classroom questioning research and the output hypothesis and interaction hypothesis,this study sums up and analyzes the characteristics of teacher questioning,including the types of questions,waiting time,questioning strategies and feedback,and discusses problems of teacher questioning in the high-quality listening and speaking class of junior high school English.This study aims to answer the following questions:(1)What are the main types and strategies of teacher questioning used in junior high school English listening and speaking high-quality classes?(2)What is the main feedback of teacher questioning? How long is the waiting time?(3)What problems do teachers have in asking questions in junior high school English listening and speaking class?According to the data analysis and classroom observation,the study has arrived at the following conclusions:(1)Teachers use both referential questions and display questions for different teaching purposes in different teaching stages.There are slightly more referential questions than display questions in teacher questioning.(2)Among the eight teachers who participated in the competition,the probing strategy was used most frequently(47%),and the other four questioning strategies also accounted for a large proportion.In classroom teaching,almost all strategies are used effectively.(3)According to the difficulty of questions and students’ reactions,the waiting time of teachers is different.The waiting time for simple questions or some questions that do not require students to answer is about 1-2 seconds,and the waiting time for difficult questions is about 7-10 seconds.(4)All eight teachers are more inclined to use positive feedback(95%),among which simple praise is the most frequently used one,followed by praise with comments and praise with further questions,while negative feedback is less used.(5)In the corpus,teachers also have some problems in classroom teaching:teachers’ directions are not clear enough.The students analysis is not accurate enough.And the distribution of teachers’ questions to students is not even,and teachers prefer to ask questions to the students in the front rows and in the middle,seldom question those in the back of the classroom.Base on the findings,this study puts forward the following teaching suggestions:First,the display questions and referential questions should be paid equal attention to,and more referential questions should be put forward appropriately.Second,teachers should be familiar with each questioning strategy and use appropriate questioning strategies to help students answer.Third,teachers should plan the waiting time reasonably based on students’ cognitive level and question difficulty and appropriately extend the waiting time for difficult questions.Fourthly,teachers’ feedback should not be regarded as the end of classroom communication but as a means to promote teacher-student interaction and language output.Through the research on excellent teachers questioning in listening and speaking classes,this research can provide a reference for teaching.