A Research on Effective Questioning  in English Reading Classes of a Junior High School

一、选题背景与意义（说明所选课题的历史背景、国内外研究现状和发展趋势）

1. Background of the study

In English reading class, teacher questioning is one of the significant forms of interaction between teachers and students. It can not only guide students to read, help them to better comprehend the text, but stimulate them to think, and help correcting the miscomprehension. Therefore, the study of effective questioning is of great importance for improving teaching quality of English reading.

   Limited researches have been done in this aspect so far. According to Liu Yongbing, Zhang Dongbo and Zhao Shouhui (2008), the status of students’ reading teaching is not satisfied. Teachers’ question focus more attention to the content of the text and vocabulary teaching, but little on discourse  contributing to the development of students’ reading ability and cognition. Therefore, studies of teachers questioning will be helpful to English education.

2. Significance of the study

In traditional English reading class, teaching approach regards text as the carrier of teaching grammar and language knowledge, ignoring the training of the students’ ability of reading comprehension. In addition, the traditional way of reading comprehension questions stops proceeding at the level of understanding surface layer of reading articles.

To achieve the sincere dialogue between students and the text, the key point is to establish the adjustment of the direct context between the text and readings. Teachers guide students to actively participate in English teaching and complete the task together by asking questions. In the process of teaching reading, teachers mainly want to learn about how well the students have mastered the knowledge through asking questions.

This study tries to provide a theoretical guidance for improving the current status of English reading classes in junior high school and the findings of this study may help teachers of junior high school evaluate the effective ness of their own questioning.

二、研究的基本内容和拟解决的主要问题

The study will be conducted with the purpose of investigating the current situation or the characteristics of teacher questioning in junior high school English reading classes. The research questions are as follows:

1. What are the forms of questions in the reading classes in a junior high school?

2. What types of questions are used in the reading classes in a junior high school?

3. What ways of questioning are adopted in the reading classes in a Junior high school?

4. What are the strategies of questioning in the reading classes in a junior high school?

三、研究方法及措施（拟采取的研究手段及技术路线、实验方案等）

   Three modes of instruments are used in this study: classroom observation, questionnaire and interview. Among them, the classroom observation and questionnaire were used as the main instrument, and interview was used as a complementary one.

Three English teachers teach the same unit. (Which unit will be observed has not been decided yet.) Their classes will be observed and audio recorded with teachers’ permission. In addition, in order to reflect the actual situation of English reading classes of the teachers, the researcher did not tell them about the purpose of the research in detail.

The questionnaire is designed for students about teacher questioning. In order to make students understand the questionnaire easily, the content of the questionnaire are written in Chinese.

   For interview, the researcher attempts to explore the deeper and further reasons about teacher’s questioning. Several questions are designed for teachers about their awareness on questioning, reasons on forms of questions, purposes on types of questions, reasons on ways of questioning and opinions on strategies they use in reading classes.