A survey of teacher-generated reading comprehension questions the case of a district-wide training course in Beijing

In secondary schools in China, students generally rely on course books to access reading materials. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that some questions in text books do not appear to be very effective, so teachers find themselves either improving on the original questions or developing alternative ones. Teachers also find themselves searching for reading passages in order to supplement course books, using these as the basis for creating further comprehension tasks. In order to promote the professional development of English teachers in secondary schools, the Beijing Education Committee carried out a one-year teacher training programme in 2013, which covered, amongst a range of topics, the setting of appropriate reading comprehension questions. The teachers’ development was evaluated at the end of the programme by means of a survey (see Appendix 2) which asked participants to design reading comprehension tasks based on a given. The first author of this paper was involved in the training, and the later issuing and analysis of the survey. The second author was the project supervisor. This study aims to analyse a representative sample of these reading comprehension tasks to identify what kind of questions were asked