In the background of quality education with student-centered as the basic principal, transmission of knowledge should not be the only purpose of teaching。 As New English Curriculum Standards (2011) suggests, the ultimate goal of English teaching is to develop students’ ability to use English to do things in an all-round way, with emphasis on learning strategy, learning skills and learning styles。 After taking English classes, students are supposed to develop competences for thinking, cooperation, exploration as well as acquiring language knowledge。 Furthermore, reading course, as one type of the English-learning courses, is meant to develop students pergent thinking and critical thinking ability besides the comprehension ability。 This distinguished feature of reading course makes questioning more important in classroom reading teaching, especially using the target language which produces extra difficulties for English learners。

At this point, many researchers and educators have taken intensive interests to study questioning in classroom teaching。 As early as in 1912, Stevens pointed out that eighty percent of the teaching time is asking questions everyday。 Contemporary studies about questions show that teachers' questioning behavior largely remain the same, teacher usually asks about three hundred to four hundred questions every day。 In general, scholars at home and abroad are mainly concentrated on two aspects of teachers' classroom questioning。 One is to focus on the study of the question itself, such as the classification of the questions; the number of questions and etc; The other one is to focus on teacher, involving teacher's personality, way to answer, feedback, questioning strategies and etc; the third one is focused on the effectiveness, such as question validity and effectiveness teaching。 And currently, more and more scholars and front-line teachers begin to pay attention to classroom questioning strategies in English teaching, but there are few empirical research studying questions in Reading course。 Through literature review, the author had found that Wang(2003, 2008) have studied the questioning strategies systematically and put forward concrete principles。 In terms of the studies in reading course, there are scholars like Luo (2006), Wei (2007) and Nunan (1987), who looked into questioning in class。 These studies have indicated that some questions in reading class are far from communicative。 In a word, classroom questioning requires effective strategies to help improve the teaching effect。论文网

1。2 Purpose of the research

Previous studies have indicated the positive effect of using questioning strategies to a certain degree。 However, the abundant relative researches either lack a concrete method, or were implemented in colleges and senior middle schools, seldom in junior middle schools。 The author of this thesis attempts to probe into one specific type of English courses, reading course in junior middle school。 As English is non-native language in China, there would be no language environment in Chinese students’ learning process。 Thus, reading has become an important channel for students to obtain information and basis for developing other language skills。 No matter what kind of reading strategies are adopted, the interaction between teacher and students should be purposeful, orderly and controlled。 So the teacher’s questions would be the most important means to guide the interaction so as to give prominence to students’ active status in class。 This thesis aims at finding out defects in questioning in reading course in junior middle school, exploring the ways of how to better question students in English reading class so as to put forward some specific suggestions and operative strategies。

1。3 Structure of the thesis

This thesis comprises five parts。 Part One introduces background and purpose of the research, as well as addresses the research questions。 Part Two reviews the relevant literature in terms of the classroom questions, effectiveness of classroom questions and effective reading。 Part Three describes the present study, including the subjects involved and some characteristics of junior middle school students would be summarized by the author as the basis for data analysis in the next part。 Also the brief procedure would be introduced。 Part Four analyzes the data in the aspects of the number and types of the questions, strategies used in questioning, distribution of question-answer as well as feedbacks。 Part Five is the discussion about the appropriate application of questioning and some limitation of this study。 Also, this part addresses the conclusion of the whole study, which presents the major findings and suggestions for EFL teaching and further research。