INFUSING HIGHER-ORDER QUESTIONS INTO SPEAKING ACTIVITY: A CASE STUDY OF L2 LEARNER’S SPEAKING PROFICIENCY AND HIGHER-ORDER THINKING

For the teaching of speaking in classroom, there are various teaching methods, from the Audio-Lingual Method to Communicative Language Teaching Method (CLT), even the recent Task-Based Learning Approach (TBLT), all emphasize the spoken language (Cook, 2001). In China, English speaking ability has been regarded as a problematic issue in L2 learning. This paper focuses on infusing thinking skills into L2 speaking development. More research has begun to investigate a number of thinking frameworks and their relation to learning speaking. In order to examine the application of higher-order questioning (HOQ), an empirical study has been designed to explain its impact on L2 learners’ oral abilities and thinking. The literature review involves three aspects: thinking skills in L2 classroom, Bloom’s taxonomy, and higher-order questions and spoken output. The main research question is: will higher-order question (HOQ) develop L2 learner’s speaking proficiency and higher-order thinking? Methodologically, this paper deals with six Newcastle University students coming from China as participants, their speaking ability, the process of the speaking test activity and interview as well as the data analysis. The findings indicate that in respect of length of utterance, participants answering HOQ can talk longer, and produce longer sentences. As for speaking proficiency, with the help of HOQ, participants show an effective thinking process, become more active and produce sentence naturally and coherently, and more, they can use better grammatical complexity with some flexibility. When L2 learners’ own initiative is aroused by HOQ, it is a solid step towards fruitful speaking development.