Abstract

English plays a very significant role in college education as a fundamental compulsory course. Meanwhile, the teaching requirements for listening, speaking, reading and writing in college English make it bear heavy multiple tasks. Questioning, which is considered as one of the most frequently used teaching method in college English class, has significant effects on the achievement of teaching strategy, and a direct impact on the construction of the college English teaching effectiveness and harmonious teacher-student relationship. College English Curriculum Requirements explicitly requires that “students should play the dominant role in teaching activities, while what teachers should do is to play a leading role”, which is a challenge for the traditional teaching method. Therefore, to explore the status quo, problems, and improvement measures of questioning in college English teaching has a very practical and theoretical significance for a better teaching strategies and improvement of English teaching quality.

Literature review and classroom observation have been taken as research methods in this study. Based on the literature review on questioning and English classroom questioning observation scale, this paper tries to find out the existing problems after sixteen college English classes observation of two teachers in Chongqing University.

Then some problems are put forward: the questions (even the display or procedural questions) are not planned very well in advance; the importance of feedback is ignored more or less, thus the effectiveness of questioning is partly taken away; sometime teachers failed to adjust waiting time according to students’ response to questions. Meanwhile, there are also some minor problems: the traditional way to pick up the answerers by the roll call shows too much authority and loses the potential equal interaction; the extension of questions is not better used in college English teaching; last but not least, some teachers seem to forget the essence of questioning, and some questions are of less value even useless, which leads to the waste of time.

Therefore, this paper puts up with some improvement measures on the type of questions, feedbacks, and some other aspects of questioning. Besides that, the author also gives some self-reflection on the topic. The target for all of this is to improve questioning effectiveness in college English teaching.

Key words: questioning, college English, problems, advice