What and Why?
Questions are important in language learning in three main ways. Firstly, and most obviously, the 'interrogative' is a grammatical form which students need to learn to master. For users of a foreign language, the ability to ask questions is essential. It provides the key to moving around in a new environment, integrating into a community and to finding essential information. Secondly, questions form one of the main 'tools' which teachers use to check students' comprehension and to get students to produce language. Thirdly, and more profoundly, the ability to generate questions is central to autonomy in learning and to the students personal educational development. Many types of questions used in classrooms, however, are display questions - that is, they require the student simply to show that they know something. This places the emphasis on reproducing isolated facts. Educational questions, on the other hand, require the students to think, to discuss, to share ideas or to investigate. They can bring about more student involvement with learning English and with their educational development in general. CES places particular emphasis on educational questions rather than display questions.
Practical ideas
- When beginning a new topic, you can get students to brainstorm what they already know about it and what they would like to find out. You can get the students to produce a question poster of things they can investigate/research over the next few weeks.
- Where possible, ask open-ended questions, to which various answers are possible, rather than closed display questions where only one answer is correct. For example, after reading a text, instead of asking factual questions such as 'What did the man do in the shop? (the answer to which is in the text), you could ask 'What do you think about what he did? Why do you think that?'
- Before reading a text, or after reading part of a text, you can ask the students to predict what will happen next.
- If the students have a reading text with conventional comprehension questions, you can ask them to try to answer the questions before they read the text, using their imagination and what they already know. They can then approach the text more actively to check their answers.
- If you get students to produce questions for each other (perhaps for the exercise box), you can ask them to formulate some educational questions rather than display questions.
- You can talk to teachers of other school subjects to find out what educational questions are relevant to the theme you are working on in CES. Students can then be asked to find answers to these questions over the next week or so. You can discuss what they have found out at a specified time.
- Rather than telling the students, you can ask them a series of questions so that they work things out for themselves. You can ask: Can you think of any other similar examples? Why do you think it is like that? When do this happen? Where? Does it always happen? When doesn't it happen? How do you think you can find out? What books would you need to look in? Who could you ask? and so on.
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