Questioning during Story-telling Activities in Singapore Pre-schools

Children attending pre-schools should acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and dispositions to develop holistically. Therefore, promoting thinking skills in children is important. One of the ways to develop and promote thinking skills in children is through “dialogue such as questioning and challenging” (Higham et al., 2010, p. 393). This study looks into pre-school teachers’ conversations with children during story-telling activities. Six Kindergarten 1 (K1) and Kindergarten 2 (K2) teachers’ story-telling activities with children were audio recorded. These recordings were then analyzed with regard to the number and type of questions asked by the teachers. Teachers also participated in qualitative interviews about their views on story-telling activities. Results have shown that teachers mostly asked factual and procedural questions. The questions asked also belonged to the lowest cognitive level of Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning domains. While most teachers agree questions could help to facilitate children’s thinking, some of them think that questions of the higher cognitive levels may be too demanding for children of this age. These results have future implications for various stakeholders.