Abstract:Under the background of the new curriculum reform, communicative competence plays an important role in the teaching quality evaluation. Questioning, an important part in the English class, is the most significant and basic way to cultivate students’ communicative competence. Questioning is also a classroom teaching skill, which can arouse students’ attention, motivate students’ interest and curiosity, make students imaginative and creative and give feedback to the teacher from students’ answering. It is worth exploring how to complete the questioning in the English class and make the class communicative to cultivate students’ ability of using English.

Nowadays, some questions asked by teachers in the English class are meaningless, which would make the class boring and inefficient, so it is necessary to point out some strategies to improve the quality of question.

This thesis is based on the middle school attached to Sichuan Normal University as an example to discuss the questioning status quo, features and factors contributed to effective questioning. The meaning of the study is to know English teachers’ thinking about effective questioning and discuss some suggestions based on the specific status quo so as to improve the quality of questioning and the effectiveness of English class and improve students’ communicative competence.

The thesis is based on some related research about classroom questioning and discusses the following questions: 1. what do teachers in senior high school think about the features of the effective questions? 2. What are the features of the teacher’s questioning in the English class? 3. what are the factors contributed to the effective questioning？The author had the empirical study and made some survey about questioning in the Middle School Attached to Sichuan Normal University from September to November in 2015. The author chooses three of seven English teachers in Grade 2 as observation subjects and makes interview with them. The author would observe and interview to make the survey.

Through observation, the author knew that display questions play dominant role in English class; teachers in senior high school would use all kinds of strategies such as repetition, explanation, prompting and so on according to different situation in English class; teachers in senior high school prefer to whole class answering and choose different ways of answering in line with different situation. Through interview, the author knew that English teachers in senior high school pretend that the questions which are related to the class and can arouse students’ thinking are effective. And effective questioning are influenced by two factors, namely the teacher’s professional level and students’ features.    

This thesis is composed of 3 chapters. In the first chapter, the author reviews theories concerning about the definition of questioning and some related issues. Chapter 2 is concerned about the research design including respondents, procedures and detailed phenomenon observed in the research. In Chapter 3, the results of this study are analyzed and discussed. Besides, teaching implications and suggestions are mentioned in this chapter.

Key Words: English teachers in senior high school Questioning Effectiveness

Content

摘要：

Abstract:

Introduction-7

Ⅰ Literature Review-8

1.1-The Definition of Questions-8

1.2-Question types-9

1.3-Questioning strategies-10

Ⅱ Methodology-11

2.1 Research Questions-11

2.2 Subjects-12

2.3 Instruments-13

2.3.1 Naturalistic inquiry-13

2.3.2 Interview-13

2.4 Procedures-14

Ⅲ Results and analysis-14

3.1 Teachers’ thinking about the features of the effective questioning-14

3.2 The features of the teacher’s questioning in the English class-16

3.3 The factors contributed to effective questioning-22

Conclusion-24

Bibliography-26

Acknowledgments-26