Skip to main content

Question types and circling


In recent years there has been a focus in schools on using questioning effectively. In professional development sessions question types are analysed, teachers learn about interesting things such as Bloom’s taxonomy and teachers are urged to employ deeper levels of questioning whenever possible.
In language lessons, however, questions are used in a different way. In most cases we don’t use questions to explore concepts and help students get to deeper levels of meaning. In our field questions and other interactions are used mainly as a device to provide TL input and opportunities to practise. 

This means that questions may be quite shallow and even artificial (where is the pen?), but have the important goal of getting students to learn and practise the language.  Exceptions to this might be when we question students about grammatical concepts in English or, with advanced students, when we talk about issues at a higher level, using the TL as a means of communication as we would in English.
Let’s look at different types of questions you can use and how you can do effective question-answer or ‘circling’ (a term mainly used in North America). Below is a hierarchy of questions moving from least to most demanding for students.

Question type
Example
Commentary
True/false statement.
Tom is a cat. True or false?
Students simply process a statement rather than a question form where the sentence structure varies. Students just have to produce true or false.
Yes/no question through intonation.
Tom’s a cat?
Students just say yes or no. there is no question form to decode. The pitch shows it’s a question.
Yes/no question.
Is Tom a cat?
Students have to do a little more decoding here, but still only have to say yes or no.
Either/or question.
Is Tom a cat or a dog?
A little more decoding required, but students only have to choose between two options they are given.
Multiple-choice question.
Is Tom a dog, cat, elephant or crocodile?
Slightly harder than the above because of added options.
Question word question.
What is Tom?
Hardest question type since the students can’t use much in the input to help them produce their answer.

In doing question-answer work with beginners you can use these questions in order of difficulty, reusing vocabulary repeatedly. Students are happy to go along with the artificiality of the exchange. With higher level students you could choose question types to differentiate between students, saving the highest order questions for the most able.

This type of circling can be used to work on a single statement.

e.g. Donald arrived with his friends at the party at 10 o’clock.

Donald arrived at a party. True or false?
Did Donald arrive at the cinema?
Did Donald arrive with his friends or on his own?
Did Donald arrive at 9.00, 10.00 or 11.00?
When did Donald arrive?
Where did he go?
Who did he go with?
What time did he arrive?
Have you been to a party recently?
Who did you go with?
What did you do there?
What did you eat and drink?

Note how it’s useful to personalise questions whenever possible to raise interest. It’s often said that adolescents are quite self-focused and that teachers can use this fact to their advantage when planning topics and lessons. Now, there are clearly limits to what you can do with this technique. You don’t want to be too repetitive, but having a clear awareness of your full range of question types is valuable while the technique allows you to recycle a great deal of high frequency language, which is fundamental for acquisition.

For more about questioning and, in particular, Bloom's Taxonomy, see this by Gianfranco Conti:


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a langua...

Zaz - Si jamais j'oublie

My wife and I often listen to Radio Paradise, a listener-supported, ad-free radio station from California. They've been playing this song by Zaz recently. I like it and maybe your students would too. I shouldn't really  reproduce the lyrics here for copyright reasons, but I am going to translate them (with the help of another video). You could copy and paste this translation and set it for classwork (not homework, I suggest, since students could just go and find the lyrics online). The song was released in 2015 and gotr to number 11 in the French charts - only number 11! Here we go: Remind me of the day and the year Remind me of the weather And if I've forgotten, you can shake me And if I want to take myself away Lock me up and throw away the key With pricks of memory Tell me what my name is If I ever forget the nights I spent, the guitars, the cries Remind me who I am, why I am alive If I ever forget, if I ever take to my heels If one day I run away Remind me who I am, wha...

What is the phonological loop?

This post is about how we use part of our short-term memory (working memory) to process sounds, words and longer utterances. I also intend to show how knowing about the phonological loop can help you refine your practice as a language teacher. Firstly, what is the phonological loop and where does it fit into a popular model of working memory? To start with, it's probably best to start by activating another component of short-term memory, your visuo-spatial sketchpad. Look at this diagram: Image from cheese360 at Wikimedia Commons That is one depiction of the well-known model of working memory put forward by cognitive psychologists Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch back in 1974. But first, when we see, hear, touch, taste or smell something our sensory memory takes note (beneath our consciousness). As far as language is concerned, we choose to pay attention to it and the information enters working memory, more specifically what are called the visuo-spatial sketchpad (aka scr...