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The employment of questioning as an instructional tool has always been considered part of the tea... more The employment of questioning as an instructional tool has always been considered part of the teaching tradition, and has a long history. The focus on teacher questioning recently has been due to the opportunities that teacher questioning can provide for students to become actively engaged while also developing thinking skills. This paper describes an ongoing study of three teachers' classroom questioning behavior in an ESL proficiency course in a public university in Malaysia. The study aims to investigate the types of questions teachers ask in class and the responses elicited from students. The study is conducted on a small scale and is in-depth in nature, using three instruments for triangulation to help to validate the findings. Data is collected using a questionnaire, a semi-structured interview protocol to determine teacher rationale for teacher questions used in the classroom, and video-taped classroom interactions between teacher and students. This paper presents the preliminary findings of the study based on data collected from the video recordings of the class sessions. This paper also recommends strategies to promote teacher questioning and student learning based on the preliminary findings.

The ability to cite reasons, to justify claims and give support to arguments is seen as primary c... more The ability to cite reasons, to justify claims and give support to arguments is seen as primary characteristics of a critical thinker. This paper discusses how the ‘Elements of Reasoning ’ is employed with Socratic Questioning to develop critical thinking in the language classroom. The principles that guide the questioning are laid out clearly, just as is the response which must be backed by valid reasons, examples, and illustrations, pushing students beyond mere recall and into abstract thinking. It is based on the notion that through questioning, the process that occurs in the student’s mind creates thinking and learning.

The ability to cite reasons, to justify claims and give support to arguments is seen as primary c... more The ability to cite reasons, to justify claims and give support to arguments is seen as primary characteristics of a critical thinker. This paper discusses how the ‘Elements of Reasoning’ is employed with Socratic Questioning to develop critical thinking in the language classroom. The principles that guide the questioning are laid out clearly, just as is the response which must be backed by valid reasons, examples, and illustrations, pushing students beyond mere recall and into abstract thinking. It is based on the notion that through questioning, the process that occurs in the student’s mind creates thinking and learning.

4 Abstract: Debate is a common co-curricular activity involving most Malaysian schools at the dis... more 4 Abstract: Debate is a common co-curricular activity involving most Malaysian schools at the district level. Every year, each school would send three students to represent its team. In this study, forty (40) second language learners, aged 16 years old, were involved in a two hour debate activity carried out three days per week for three consecutive weeks. This activity was organized by their school seniors, aged 18 years, as part of their English assignment. A pre-post critical thinking test was carried out among the debaters and at the end of the activity, a survey was undertaken to gauge their perception of the thinking process they had experienced. The result revealed that there was a significant difference in their critical thinking skills before and after the debate activity as the intervention. The survey and teacher observation offered feedback on how debate foster their critical thinking. Among others, it showed the importance of scaffolding and collaborative learning in en...

The present study was an attempt to explore the level of burnout among primary school teachers in... more The present study was an attempt to explore the level of burnout among primary school teachers in Malaysia. In addition, the study tried to determine if the school type has any significant influence on teachers' burnout level. To this end, 714 primary school teachers participated in the study. They were teaching at Malay (SK), Tamil (SJKT), and Chinese (SJKC) medium schools. The Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educators Survey (MBI-ES) (Maslach, Jackson, & Schwab, 1986) was used to collect the data on the teachers' burnout. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were used to analyze the data. The findings showed that the teachers' burnout ranged from moderate to low level. In addition, it was found that the teachers working at SJKC experienced lower level of Personal Accomplishments (PA) than those at SK and SJKT schools.

International Journal of Education and Literacy Studies

An action research study was conducted among 24 Form 4 level Malaysian students, aged 16. The dur... more An action research study was conducted among 24 Form 4 level Malaysian students, aged 16. The duration of the study was five months and constituted 16 one-hour literature lessons (short stories from the secondary level Malaysian English Language Upper Secondary Level school syllabus). This paper describes my experience as a teacher-as-researcher to assist students to respond to teacher questions through Paul's (1993) model of Socratic Questioning which claims to develop students' critical thinking. Data was collected through researcher's field notes, students' writing tasks and student interviews which were analysed after each cycle of the action research study. Changes and adaptations were consequently made based on the data collected and upon teacher reflection to improve practice. The results of this study indicate that repeated practice of Socratic Questioning had a positive effect on student responses and writing tasks. Some of the factors affecting students' performance included students' language proficiency, weak reading ability and students' anxiety towards the questioning method. These issues had to be addressed and dealt with, before Socratic Questioning could be properly implemented in the classroom.

The ability to cite reasons, to justify claims and give support to arguments is seen as primary c... more The ability to cite reasons, to justify claims and give support to arguments is seen as primary characteristics of a critical thinker. This paper discusses how the ‘Elements of Reasoning’ is employed with Socratic Questioning to develop critical thinking in the language classroom. The principles that guide the questioning are laid out clearly, just as is the response which must be backed by valid reasons, examples, and illustrations, pushing students beyond mere recall and into abstract thinking. It is based on the notion that through questioning, the process that occurs in the student’s mind creates thinking and learning.

International Journal of Education and Literacy Studies

The ability to cite reasons, to justify claims and give support to arguments is seen as primary c... more The ability to cite reasons, to justify claims and give support to arguments is seen as primary characteristics of a critical thinker. This paper discusses how the ‘Elements of Reasoning’ is employed with Socratic Questioning to develop critical thinking in the language classroom. The principles that guide the questioning are laid out clearly, just as is the response which must be backed by valid reasons, examples, and illustrations, pushing students beyond mere recall and into abstract thinking. It is based on the notion that through questioning, the process that occurs in the student’s mind creates thinking and learning.