A Survey about Questioning in English
Class of Senior School in Guizhou Province
1. Introduction
It is widely accepted that questioning is a basic skill that teachers are supposed to留学生论文/ have a good command of. Gall (1970) regarded teacher as a professional question maker and stated that the asking of questions is one of the basic ways by which the teacher stimulates student to think and learn. In an excellent teacher’s lesson we may often find that the atmosphere of the class is dynamic and students are completely immersed in the lesson. There are several ways through which a teacher can apply to lead his or hers class positively and pleasantly. Questioning is an effective and a frequently neglected method which enables teachers to instruct knowledge and at the same time to manage the whole class easily and successfully.
The history of question is as old as language itself, and the use of questions as a teaching method is at least as old as classrooms (E.C.Wragg, 1984 : 97). Studies of questions and questioning in classes may be traced from pre-Socratic philosophers till modern times. In the nineteenth century questions were much discussed by school inspectors (Macnamare, 1980) and there had several studies of questioning. The first one was an American pedagogical expert, Stevens, who reported that teachers in his study asked about 395questions per day, which was supported by a large number of later studies. In 1960 Floyd sampled a group of teachers and found that they gave 348 questions averagely per day (E.C.Wragg, 1984 :97); another research, sponsored by Moyer in 1966, indicated that in a Science lesson, teachers asked 180 questions (Li Rumi,1988:345). At the middle school level Bellack and his colleagues, in 1966, also did such kind of study and it showed that the core of the academicals procedure is teacher’s questions and students’ answers, and frequently included teacher’s responses to the answers; Moreover, it showed many class discourse, seventy two percent of it was delivered by teachers, seven percent by students and the rest was used to concentrate students’ attention or estimate students’ answers (Li Rumi,1988:345). Stevens said that questioning is a basic teaching method which stimulates student to think actively, which is a way for teachers to evaluate the teaching effects. Gall’s research showed that 60% of teachers’ questions require students to recall facts, about 20% require students to think reflectively and logically, and the remaining 20% are procedural questions; in his research into secondary schools in Britain, only 3.6% of all teachers’ questions fell into Bloom’s (1956) higher-order category questions which are similar to open-ended or speculative questions. (Mustafa ŞEVİK: 2017). Generally speaking, over 60% of teachers’ questions are concerned with the recall of facts (see Gall. 1970; Hargie, 1978). Particularly, according to G..A.Brwon and R.Edmondson’s research on the types of questions asked by different teachers of different subjects, questions asked by second-language teachers are more concerned with basic linguistic competence (E.C.Wragg, 1984: 107).
Those studies by foreign experts suggest that questioning in school takes an indispensable place; however, they were made in the context different from China and the subjects they studied are almost foreign teachers and students. Therefore it is of great significance to observe，英语论文，英语论文题目 |
