A Study of Teacher’s Questioning Strategies in Junior English Class 英语专业毕业论文1.doc

a study of teachers questioning strategies in junior english classacknowledgementsi would like to express my appreciation to many people who supported me in my writing this thesis during the past few months. i could not have finished this thesis without the assistance of many people.first and foremost, i am greatly thankful to my academic adviser professor liu yan. had it not been her patient help, the thesis could not have resulted in innumerable improvement and been brought to the present appearance. secondly, i would acknowledge the help from the teachers and students of ning dong middle school. i would like to express my thanks especially to professor ha xiuqing, professor niu xiaojun and professor jia chaying, and so on, whose lectures in different fields of linguistics have been of great value to the writing of this thesis. last but not least, my dorm mates give me a lot of help; the discussion with them encourages me to finish this thesis in time. my special thanks also go to my parents for their continuous love, care and support.abstractclassroom 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. 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 problems 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 grade, 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contentsacknowledgementsiabstractii摘 要iii1 introduction12 literature review22.1 the theoretical support32.2 research abroad and at home63 methodology83.1 subjects83.2 instruments93.3 data collection103.4 data analysis154 conclusion16bibliography18(appendix)2021a study of teachers questioning strategies in junior english class1 introductionas 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 adjust 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 processes 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 effectiveness 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 solving, and evaluation; and it also can promote students thinking about the way of their own learning (kissock and iyortsuun 6).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 important 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 likedo you see.？. sometimes 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 think 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 study would be beneficial to improve teachers classroom questioning skills.2 literature reviewin 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 the factors of questioning. finally it presents the previous studies of teacher questioning abroad and at home.2.1 the theoretical supportthe 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 western 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 eventually 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 enlighten.”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 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)also advocated, “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 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 questioning. 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 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 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 the expectation of the question (longman 89). 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 about 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 which 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 good 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 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 curriculum 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).2.2 research abroad and at homequestioning requires specific strategies which are unique due to different teachers, different 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. generally 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 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 answering 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), 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 output when they answer questions (krashen 1982) and efl questions (ellis 1994), 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 these 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 questioning.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 significant 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 questioning, as questions types, wait-time and feedback and so on (32-37). yet zhou jin pointed out “although good questions have the obvious teaching value, it seems that teachers paid little attention to the effective questioning of the theme” (qtd. in zhou jin 2006)it is obvious that the researches on classroom questioning in china have got great improvement in recent years. however, the literature researches are more than the empirical researches. compared with the overseas researches, domestic studies need to be deepened and broadened. whats more, the researches on questioning should adapt to the real teaching situation in chinese efl classes. therefore this study aims to investigate the existing problems in local junior school of classroom questioning in english.3 methodologybased on the classroom observation, the author aims to find out that what kind of questions the junior students english class would like to answer and how the teachers give the feedback to the students questions. with the purpose of improving the junior english teaching efficiency and developing the students conscious and initiative learning an experiment is conducted.3.1 subjects ning dong middle school is a mid-level junior high school in ning dong town which located in the east of lingwu city. there are 48 teachers and about 600 students in the school. the subjects of this study are made up of four teachers and 100 students. class 2 of grade 7 has 52 students which was taught by t4 and class 4 of grade7 has 48 students which was taught by t1. the students in these two classes are poor in english study and they are at the ordinary level in english achievement. the teachers detailed information is shown below. teachersexageteaching experience(year)number of studentsclass& gradet1female5430487 (4)t2female328508 (2)t3male306409 (1)t4(the author)female24two months527 (2)3.2 instrumentsthere different kinds of instruments are involved in this study. they are classroom observation, questionnaires and interviews.the classroom observation period lasted for one week in september, 2012. altogether 10 classes (approximately 450 minutes) were audio-recorded. the author observed the class without telling the teacher in advanced, and she personally attended each class and took notes with the three teachers permission.after classroom observation the three teachers were interviewed face to face, and each interview lasted about 10 minutes after class. in order to avoid unnecessary misleading, chinese is used during the interviews, and the contents of the interviews were translated into english for the seek of data analysis in the thesis. the interview is aimed at the form and functions of questions in english class, so as to accurately and comprehensively understands the existing problems of questioning in junior middle school.after finishing the classroom observation and interview, 100 questionnaires were distributed to students in class 2 class 4 and were collected immediately in october with 100 questionnaires all being valid. questionnaire includes 14 multiple questions about the object of teachers questioning, the way of teachers questioning and the attitude of students towards the questions. (see appendix)3.3 data collectionin this part, the four teachers questioning strategies are to discussed, based on the three stages: classroom observation, interview and questionnaire.1) classroom observationthe result concerning the frequency of display questions and referential questions used in junior middle school in four teachers class was presented as follows.table1: the frequency of display and referential questionsitemteacherquestioning quantity(n) / each classdisplay questionreferential questionnrationratiot1302376.7%723.3%t2221672.7%627.3%t3352057.1%1542.9%t4151066.7%533.3%table1 shows that in the observed class, there was a big difference in question numbers between display questions and referential questions. obviously, display questions surpass referential questions with the biggest contrast of 76.7 percent display question and 23.3 percent. since most students prefer display questions, more display questions than referential questions were asked in class.hakansson and lindberg (cited in ellis 588) and cross (1991) discuss such three groups of questions as yes/no form, wh- form and or form. based on their discussion the author calculated the number of these questions forms in this study. table2 indicates that in each class question of wh- form was asked a lot. it is the main way of asking questions. due to the fact that t1 is an experienced teacher, she asked wh-form questions mostly. she paid attention to cultivate students creative thinking and ability while t4 is a young teacher who asked the fewest questions and she should make a better question design and teaching plan.table2: the form of teachers questioningteacheryes/nowh-orthe total numbert11318233t2109322t31115632t4564152) inte