Excessive use of questions that students are already known is unlikely to arouse language output, because answers are so conspicuous that students don’t need to think. The excessive use of such questions is adverse to the cultivation of cognitive ability and logical thinking of students.

1.2.4 Unseemly feedback

Feedback is also a vital process of questioning. Unseemly feedback means that the language that teachers use to assess is ambiguous or improper. In addition, some teachers do a quite bad job in listening to students. They, sometimes even cut into their talking and rush into their mind. Inferior feedback will hit students’ enthusiasm and they will refuse to interact in class by degrees. For example, some teachers will give wrong feedback like “You are wrong”, “You’ve made a mistake”, “Her answer is much better than yours”.

Actually, feedback should take persified assessment ways, giving priority to encouragement. Language is not the only way to giving feedback. Eye contact, facial expressions, body language are all the effective ways of teachers’ question.

 2. Literature Review

2.1 Study on Teachers’ Question at Home and Abroad

In 1912, American scholar R.Steven first started a systematic study on teachers’ questioning in classes, which stated that classroom teaching was actually composed of a bunch of questions and answers. Since the beginning of the 20th century to the middle, most western researchers focused on the descriptive study of questioning behaviors. From 1950s to 1970s, researchers mainly discussed the types of questions in classes. Since 1970s, the research tended to discuss classification, content, time and function. And many practical experiences on how to ask effective questions were put forward in these papers. 

Compared with studies abroad, domestic researches on teachers’ questioning are far more behind. Thus most of the papers are based on the foreign ones, which are too theoretical and lack systematic and convincing inferences. However, there are still some scholars persist that studies should pay much more attention to the qualities of questioning. Hong Songzhou and Lu Zhengzhi (2008) analyzed definition, strategies and evaluation criteria in their article, which was helpful both to theoretical studies and practices. In 2009, Hou Song made a comparison between the questions at home and abroad. He mentioned that teachers should pay more attention to strategies and stressed the relationship between teachers talk and students’ output. Other researchers, like Shao Huailing, suggested that questions should be designed according to its type and level.

From the studies both at home and abroad, we can clearly find that all the researchers consider questioning as a great and vital method to put spurs to classroom interaction, as well as to enhance students’ logical thinking. Different researchers classify the patterns of questioning based on different aspects. Therefore, in this paper, the author will integrate domestic researching achievements into foreign ones, carrying out a survey to study teachers’ questioning in middle school English classes.