An Empirical Case Study on Teacher Questioning Strategies Targeting Thinking Quality in Senior High School English Reading Instruction

In the context of China’s curriculum reform emphasizing core competencies in English education, the cultivation of students’ thinking quality—encompassing logical, critical, and creative thinking—has emerged as a central objective of senior high school English reading instruction. Among various classroom prac-tices, teacher questioning stands out as a pervasive and powerful tool to foster cognitive engagement and deep learning. This study investigates how strategi-cally designed questioning can support the development of thinking quality in students, using a 40-minute senior high school English reading lesson as a case. Grounded in the three-level cognitive questioning model and Zone of Proximal Development theory, the study employs a mixed-method approach that inte-grates content analysis and case-based inquiry. Teacher questions were system-atically analyzed from three dimensions: cognitive level, scaffolding function, and alignment with thinking quality. The findings reveal a progressive pattern of questioning across different instructional phases, moving from lower-order to higher-order questions. These questions provided cognitive support through prompting and guided elaboration and effectively stimulated higher-order thinking skills The study concludes that a systematic, hierarchical approach to designing teacher questions plays a pivotal role in enhancing students’ thinking quality. By providing both theoretical grounding and empirical evidence, this research contributes to the refinement of teacher questioning strategies in high school English reading classrooms and offers practical implications for fostering deeper student engagement and intellectual development.