With the intention to solve these problems in teachers’ questioning and improve the class efficiency, the thesis studies on the Socratic question and other previous studies on questioning. Based on these theoretical foundations, the thesis illustrates the functions of teachers’ questioning and puts forward some relevant techniques on questioning. The findings show that: teachers’ questioning is not only used to draw students’ attention and curiosity, check the teaching effect, train students’ expressive ability, but also to trigger students’ thinking and stimulate the classroom interaction. Thus, four questioning techniques can be used to improve the questioning effect: affective technique; question design technique; carrying-out technique and feedback technique.源/自:吹冰:;论-文'网www.chuibin.com

To sum up, when employing the questioning device, it is necessary to take students’ expectancy and characteristics, both physically and psychologically, into consideration. Teachers need to realize that all the questions must be student-centered.

2. Literature Review

Teachers’ questioning is an important technique. Pedagogically, for decades teachers of different subjects have used questions extensively to help themselves understand the students, and also to help students learn the subjects better. Many English teachers and researchers have regarded teacher questioning as an important object in English class teaching.The history of questioning can be traced back to 400 B.C, when Socrates first used questioning as a teaching method. The Socratic Questioning is based on the practice of disciplined, rigorously thoughtful dialogue. The instructor pretended to be ignorant of the topic under discussion in order to elicit students’ engagement in the dialogue. Socrates is convinced that disciplined practice of thoughtful questioning enables students to examine ideas logically and to be able to determine the validity of those ideas. Also known as the dialectical approach, Socratic Questioning can correct misconceptions and lead to reliable knowledge construction. Although Socratic Questioning appears to be simple, it is in fact intensely rigorous. As described in the writings of Plato, a student of Socrates, the teacher feigns ignorance about a given subject in order to acquire the students’ fullest possible knowledge of the topic. Inpiduals have the capacity to recognize contradictions, so Socrates assumed that incomplete or inaccurate ideas would be corrected during the process of disciplined questioning, and hence would lead to progressively greater truth and accuracy.

Socratic Questioning is in fact a revelation that questions are not just asked by teachers to challenge students but to attain other goals. Just as Socrates puts that the students can organize their ideas logically and correct their mistakes during the process of answering questions. From the author’s perspective, in addition to these advantages, teachers’ questioning has many other functions in classroom teaching.

Banbrook and Skehan point out that “they (teacher questions) can be used to allow the learners to keep participating in the discourse and even modify it so that the language used becomes more comprehensible and personally relevant (Banbrook and Skehan 1989: 96). Amy B.M. Tsui concludes that “teachers’ questions have the triggering function of getting students to practice linguistic forms and of generating some authentic opportunities for them to use the target language for communication” (Amy B.M. Tsui 1995: 79). Therefore, effective questioning has a lot of functions in English classroom teaching.

In the author’s opinion, teachers’ questioning has the following functions: to draw students’ attention and curiosity; to check the teaching effect, train students’ expressive ability, but also to trigger students’ thinking and most importantly to stimulate the classroom interaction.