1、i A Study of Teachers Questioning Strategies in Junior English Class Abstract Classroom questioning as a common method used by teachers which plays an important role in classroom teaching and it is also of great significance in bilateral activities between teachers and students in English teaching.
2、The study first reviews and describes the main problems existing in teachers questioning strategies in Junior English class by means of class observation, field-note taking, questionnaires and irregular interviews with the teachers and their students, and then musters the four teachers questioning p
3、roblems in classroom questioning strategies, for instance, teachers tend to ask more display and lower-level questions than referential and high-level questions in Junior school English class. At last the questioning strategies are changed in English class so as to observe the change of students gra
4、de, the results showed that the effective questioning strategies can improve teaching efficiency and have an influence on students grade. Key words: Junior English class, types of questions, questioning strategies ii 初中英语课堂提问策略研究 摘 要 提问作为教师常用的一种方法，在课堂教学中起着举足轻重的作用 ,也是英语课堂教学中师生进行双边活动的重要形式。本论文首先回顾与梳理了现
5、实生活中初中英语课堂提问中存在的问题，并结合实际课堂观摩、记录、调查问卷以及对教师和学生的随机访谈，掌握了四位教师在课堂提问策略中存在的问题，如教 师倾向于展示性和低级的问题而参阅性和高级的问题则较少涉及。本研究通过改变和运用各种提问策略后，对学生的成绩变化进行对比，结果显示英语课堂中提问策略的改进有利于教师提高教学效率和学生改善学习。 关键词 ：初中英语课堂，提问类型，提问策略 iii Contents Acknowledgements . i Abstract . i 摘 要 . ii 1 Introduction . 1 2 Literature Review . 2 2.1 The T
6、heoretical Support . 3 2.2 Research Abroad and at Home . 6 3 Methodology . 8 3.1 Subjects . 8 3.2 Instruments . 9 3.3 Data Collection . 10 3.4 Data Analysis . 15 4 Conclusion . 16 Bibliography . 18 (Appendix) . 20 1 A Study of Teachers Questioning Strategies in Junior English Class 1 Introduction As
7、 a key factor in language teaching, the interaction between students and teachers is enlightened and maintained mostly by teachers questioning. And questioning is the important element of language class, because through questioning, not only can teachers interact with students, but they can also adj
8、ust their language used in class so as to make themselves easily understood. Teachers ask many questions in teaching, which is such a common form of teaching that we cannot discuss methodology without discussing the functions of questioning. Since questions can focus students attention and develop p
9、rocesses of thinking and guide inquiry and decision-making students could be alert and pay much attention to the knowledge after being questioned. And questions can help students recall and remember the knowledge that they have already learned, while teachers adopt questions to assess the effectiven
10、ess of their own teaching (Gan Yan 3). In addition, proper questioning can extend students thinking from the concrete and factual to the analytical and evaluative; it can lead students through a planned sequence which progressively establishes key understandings; it can promote reasoning, problem so
11、lving, and evaluation; and it also can promote students thinking about the way of their own learning (Kissock and Iyortsuun 6). 2 However most students in the classroom are afraid of answering teachers questions, they worry about making mistakes and being laughed at by their classmates. Fear is an i
12、mportant reason for the students not to be active in answering the questions. And questions themselves lead to students reluctance to answer questions too. In teaching practice, simple questions are often asked such as: Yes or No? question, Right or Wrong？ question, or question like Do you see.？ . S
13、ometimes the question tends to be too complicated, the following question can be asked even before learning the new text as Can you describe the clue of the text? “. Additionally, some teachers speak much Chinese when they ask questions in English, or they dont allow enough time for students to thin
14、k about the questions. Since classroom questioning is frequently used in teaching and plays an important role in teaching activities, the effective use of classroom questioning strategies can make a good classroom climate and optimize the interaction between the teacher and students. The present stu
15、dy would be beneficial to improve teachers classroom questioning skills. 2 Literature Review In this chapter, it first introduces the theoretical support about teacher questioning, which contains the educational theories of Socrates and Confucius. Then it elaborates the definition of questioning and
16、 the factors of questioning. 3 Finally it presents the previous studies of teacher questioning abroad and at home. 2.1 The Theoretical Support The use of classroom questioning by teachers has a long and venerable history which can date back to the famous educators Socrates and Confucius in the Weste
17、rn and ancient China. Their educational ideas provide the theoretic instruction for the research. Socrates (469BC-399BC) is a Greek philosopher who laid the early foundations for Western philosophical thought. His “Socratic Method“ involved asking probing questions in a give-and-take which would eve
18、ntually lead to the truth. According to the maieutics of Socrates, “Thought should be born in the hearts of students; teachers should only act as the midwife did.” “The most effective teaching method is not to tell answers to people but to put a question.” “Teaching is not to instill but to enlighte
19、n.” Socrates teaching could prompt the birth of peoples thinking and this methodology is based on the theory that knowledge does not come into students heart by means of teaching directly during the process of learning. In teaching process students achieve a concept with the teachers assistance. So
20、the teachers task does not lie in fabricating or transmitting the truth, instead they are playing the role of being a midwife who will guide the students knowledge within and turn it into practical knowledge and skills. While in ancient China, the great philosopher Confucius (551BC - 479BC) 4 also a
21、dvocated, “the tutor should not enlighten the student until he has turned the problem over in his mind and arrived at a level of obtaining some thoughts but cannot speak out the standard answer.” (qtd. in the Analects of Confucius). That means in teaching, the teacher ought to get the right point to
22、 conduct the student, neither too fast nor too slow. The successors followed Confuciuss thought and developed it. After hundred years of practice and research, the conclusion is made that learning comes from thinking, while thinking comes from questioning; learning and thinking begin from questionin
23、g. Therefore, questioning, as the most common and important teaching method, becomes the first choice for teachers to carry out the heuristic teaching. And then, what is a question? According to the Longman Dictionary of English language the question is a command or interrogative expression used to
24、elicit information or a response, or to test knowledge (Longman 708). In classroom settings, teachers questions are defined as instructional cues or stimuli that convey to students the content elements to be learned and directions for what they are to do and how they are to do it (Longman 1984). In
25、the following examples, How many meals do you have every day? and List some fruits you like. regardless of the difference in grammatical construction, both sentences share a common intention of generating a response from the student-an answer. Thus an answer is defined as any response that fulfills
26、the expectation of the question (Longman 89). 5 Zhou Xi pointed out that effective questions are effected by both the students and teachers (24-26). Firstly, students knowledge and ability can affect the questions. The respondents language ability and thinking ability have different requirements abo
27、ut questions. Generally the display questions refer to those questions for which the questioner knows the answer beforehand (Nunan 187-202). Such questions are usually asked for comprehension checks, confirmation check, or clarification requests. While referential questions are those questions for w
28、hich the answer is not already known by the teacher (Nunan 187-202). Such questions may require interpretations and judgments on the part of the “answerer”. While analytical and evaluative questions required students to have higher cognitive ability. So poor students prefer display questions, but go
29、od students like the divergent, referential and challenging questions. Therefore, Zhou Xi stressed that meaningful questions should be asked to students (27-30). Secondly, teachers professional knowledge and their teaching idea are also important in questioning. A highly-qualified question from the
30、teacher should be grammatically correct, clearly expressed with loud voice, and gradually increasing the difficulty. Even for Junior high students, teachers are expected to ask questions in English to guarantee the desired result, Zhou Xi emphasized that teachers should bear the spirit of English cu
31、rriculum standards and curriculum requirements in mind. The traditional pattern of classroom teaching of seldom asking questions or way of duck-feeding does not practice (37-40). 6 2.2 Research Abroad and at Home Questioning requires specific strategies which are unique due to different teachers, di
32、fferent perspectives of language and education as well as different teaching experiences. With more and more cross-cultural communication among different countries and regions, researches on questioning have greatly increased. Study of classroom questioning is not a new topic for foreign scholars. G
33、enerally speaking, the foreign researches of questioning precede 3 stages of the time: from l912 to the 1950s; from the late 1960s into the early 1970s; and from the 1970s until today (Gan Yan 5). The previous researches of the first period almost exclusively focus on describing teachers questioning
34、 behaviors and the number or level of questions. The earliest study about questioning can be dated back to R. Stevens who began his systematic study on classroom questioning in 1912 and considered classroom questioning as “the core of effective teaching,“ because teachers questioning and students“ a
35、nswering occupies 80% of the class time (cited from Jin Chuanbao 40-44). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, studies on questioning tend to focus on the precise identification of questioning types (Sanders 1966), different factors of questioning such as wait-time (Rowe 1974) and skills (Koran 1970),
36、etc. Since the 1970s, researches on questioning of much more various issues are emerged, covering: feedback (Krashen 1982), strategies of questioning (Perrott 1982), questions in interaction (McCarthy 2002), learners 7 output when they answer questions (Krashen 1982) and EFL questions (Ellis 1994),
37、etc. From the general review of abroad on classroom questioning, it can be seen that researchers have clear ideas of how to classify questions; how long the wait-time should be given to students; what feedback teachers should provide; how to train teachers to apply questioning strategies. All of the
38、se findings provide a strong foundation for further research, however, some limitations can still be found. For example, researches carried out in EFL classes are only in the minority and most of the studies abroad focus on the teacher questioning, while only few of the researches on student questio
39、ning. With the increasing study of the foreign language teaching theory, the research of classroom questioning in China develops a lot. Nowadays, scholars and researchers study classroom questioning for solving the practical problems, and empirical study increases gradually. The following are the si
40、gnificant studies in China in recent years. Zhou Hong does the research of classroom questioning in English reading class and provides the suggestion of doing reasonable combination of open questions and closed questions in reading class (65-68). While Zhou Xing and Zhou Yun indicate that in the classes of “student-oriented pattern”, referential questions are far more than display questions from their study (59-68). Meanwhile Hu Qingqiu, Nixon and Chen Wei present a survey on the questioning pattern of English teacher according to the important items of
