grammar, spelling and punctuation, through to language teaching, For example: Talk about clothes when your child is getting dressed, or when you are sorting laundry (‘Let’s … This can be made more challenging by getting them to stick to one kind of question as long as they can until they actually repeat a question, for example taking turns asking “Do…?” until someone asks exactly the same thing as some did before. For a longer version, t ake four or five question types recently covered by students. Here are some ideas to help students focus on this more. In a similar way, you can start each adult class by asking natural questions like “What do you do?” (in the first class) and “How was your weekend?” (in later classes), then ask them to have similar conversations with their partners. The first thing to do is to get students asking questions to you and each other as soon as possible. When we want to be more polite we often use indirect question forms. As I said above, the first step towards presenting question formation is simply to get students asking you and each other questions. Do you use English in your work/ studies? This also means that extra auxiliaries like “do” and “did” no longer need to be added, as in “Where do you live?” with “do” but “May I ask where you live?” without “do”. Let’s get started with the lesson. Question and answer structures are normally introduced … Emphasize important points. Use open-ended (divergent) questions to encourage opinions, elaboration and discussion. Last week, I looked at what kind of things you might want to discuss when responding to AQA’s English Language GCSE question about structure on Paper 1.Question 3 is a new style of question and it has thrown many people into a state of confusion, most of … The term “indirect questions” is often used interchangeably with “embedded questions”, but it might be better to use “indirect question” as a more general term to also include things which are indirect but don’t follow this grammatical pattern such as “What brings you here?” (not “Why are you here?”) and “Can I check your name?” (not “What’s your name?”). Minimise the use of "yes / no" questions except when checking meaning and understanding or encouraging weaker students. There are also individual articles on this site on personal questions for kids, how questions, yes/ no questions, subject questions, and indirect questions. This article gives advice on everything from teaching the most basic questions with beginners to trickier points like embedded questions. Jumble the words of the questions and write on one worksheet or on slips of paper in an envelope. However, the most useful activities for specifically practising question formation are of two kinds – those that practise questions which they will need to ask and/ or answer outside the classroom; and those that expand the range of questions that they can make, ask and answer. General Articles For basic (object) questions, this should include fitting example questions into a five-column table with the parts “(Wh-) + aux + S + main V (+ …) ?” Grammar words like “auxiliary verb” can be either a help or a hindrance to students being able to understand question formation and use it to make their own questions, so jargon should only be used with care. 70 ways to improve your English With young learners I start every class with everyone asking each other “What’s your name?”, “How old are you?” and “How are you?” then their own choice of questions like “Do you like spiders?” and “What’s your favourite kind of pizza?” I usually do this with a game element like throwing and catching a ball, pushing a toy car around, or building a tower out of blocks as each question is asked. Also provides access to questions Give each group the sentence halves (which you have cut into strips prior to the lesson) and ask them to match them. I didn’t want to repeat the question over … When creating blanks in the questions, leave in words such as weather and focus more on who, what, where, when, why, and how as well as words such as your in questions like “What’s your favorite sport?” When conducting review games, you can include a section where students have to give the question for the answer provided. It is therefore important to mix up asking about each other’s summer holiday etc with small talk roleplays on chatting at reception in their office, in a restaurant, etc. Includes the best of BusyTeacher: the Why's and How's of Avoiding Closed Questions, Here's How You Can Perfect It With Your Students Of Different ESL Levels and Ages. For example, you could ask students to always reply with “Yes I do/ am/ will/…” to Yes/ No questions, then the others to ask follow-up questions until they can guess if that yes was true or not. They ask the same as direct questions but are considered more formal. You could play Fruit Basket as a review activity at the end of the first lesson using the answer structure and as a warm up in the next lesson using the question structure. Suitable ones which students like asking each other and can quickly make their own questions from include: Most of those are not very suitable things for adults to ask each other, so with adult classes I would start with a selection of more real-life small talk questions like: Question words should probably be presented and practised in approximately this order: Once students have enough useful questions and answers in their conscious or subconscious brains, they should be ready to work out the pattern of basic English questions like those above. The first thing to do is to get students asking questions to you and each other as soon as possible. Divide students into groups of 3 - 4 and have them complete the gap-fill exercise. Can you tell me a little about yourself? This is one possible reason why we call them “subject questions”, but what is more important is that the basic answer is the subject of a full reply. The stages of getting students started with asking questions could be: With kids the most basic questions are “What’s your name?”, “How old are you?” and “How are you?”, but after that you really need to get them asking questions with “do”, yes/ no questions, and at least one question with a different auxiliary verb/ modal verb such as “can”. Articles cover topics from English If you enjoyed this article, please help spread it by clicking one of those sharing buttons below. Teach English in Taiwan The following links cover information pertaining to teacher salaries, the cost of living in Taiwan, visa issues, and more. Though these students do not learn differently than their native-English-speaking peers, they do have particular educational needs. Submit an article about any area of the English language for publication on our web site. English language reference including definitions of English grammar Who Questions Step One: Who’s This? You could also give them a list of questions to choose from, maybe including some unsuitable taboo questions to avoid to provide some challenge and amusement. Students may struggle at first but the more familiar they are with asking questions the easier it will be for them to learn new ones. Like good teaching, effective coaching often involves the modeling of best practices. 2020. Drill, repeat, drill, repeat, drill… Beginners need lots of repetition and drilling, especially as they get to … This may be the most challenging section of the game so awarding extra points for correct answers may be appropriate. For example, Crisscross is a very simple warm up activity where students answer questions such as “How’s the weather?” but after nearly a year of doing this activity, students may struggle to come up with the correct question for the answer “It’s sunny!” Students can become accustomed to hearing key words in questions, in this case weather, and answering correctly without paying any attention to the question’s structure. Teaching English Using Games & Activities, How to teach TOEIC Listening Part Two: Question Response. This game … UsingEnglish.com is partnering with Gymglish to give you a free one-month trial of this The same thing continues with more and more classroom objects and questions until no one can remember what object goes with which question. Perhaps the best combination of those things is with a kind of volleyball with a ball or (usually) a balloon, in which with the person who has it bounces it up and down until they can think of something new to ask. It’s … Talking Time Bomb. Social media is a great way to teach English as a second language for beginners. Articles about learning, using and teaching the English language, the classroom. As you can see, you’ll need to know how to ask questions in English to be curious. Have you eaten sushi? Includes tests, a question bank, quizzes, language polls and more. teachers and language experts ready to answer your questions 24 hours a Resources and materials for ESL teachers including free ESL handouts Audience: Teachers Run through the questions scoring two points for each correctly ordered question. It’s safe to assume that every interview will start with this … Save hours of lesson preparation time with the Entire BusyTeacher Library. You can do this by adding a section of answers where students have to write the question for each answer. and quizzes, PDF lesson plans, teacher articles and a directory of Doing so teaches your … Social media provides a great opportunity for you to teach colloquial phrases and commonly used words. When interviewing English Teachers, the most suitable candidate will display a passion for the subject and imparting English skills to students. A much more complicated exception that students often come up with when given the opportunity to make their own questions is subject questions like: In many of these questions there is no “you”, so it is clear that the subject of the question must be the Wh- word. On quizzes, exams, and in real life however, students are going to need to be able to ask as well as answer questions so include some activities that draw attention to a question’s word order. In contrast, in the more common basic questions mentioned first above, the short answer is the object of a full-sentence response. Are you a student?” This can be used for many different question structures and levels. own real-life telephone calls. You can ask questions at work , at home, in the classroom, at restaurants , while shopping, while out with your friends , etc. Another complication that students are likely to come across as soon as you give them the chance to make their own questions is ones where extra words are inserted after the question word, such as: This doesn’t break the pattern explained above, and can be explained by putting everything before the auxiliary verb in the Wh- question part of the question formation structure. The simplest game is Make Me Say Yes, in which students ask “Do you have any brothers or sisters?””, “Have you ever been to France?”, etc and get one point for each “Yes” answer. This way, students will hear it while they are focusing on the structure of the answer and after practicing the target answer you can go back and do some pronunciation practice with the question too. WH questions are very common in English.The lesson below shows you how to use them correctly. As well as showing them how easy it is to really communicate in English, this should plant plenty of evidence in their brains that they can use when you later ask them to work out the rules of question formation. These kinds of polite questions are often called “embedded questions”, as the basic direct question is stuck into the polite question starter (with the changes explained above). Teaching English Conversation There is more to teaching English conversation than going into a class and "chatting" with students. There are few things more uncomfortable than being in a … That person then passes the same pen and asks the same question, then passes something else and asks a new question. Explain the usage of question tags to students and when they are more preferable than direct questions. Question and answer structures are normally introduced together because for example “How’s the weather?” and “It’s ~.” are a pair and learning one without the other is not very beneficial. Q&A: we answer your questions about English language teaching The world of English language teaching (ELT) is a constantly changing one – and even more so in recent years as the industry embraces new technology and teaching methods. This 5-step process should help you with just that! During production exercises, questions are usually provided so that students have some guidelines or organization for their activities. Once your lesson plans start including more of these, students will have better success remembering and using questions. BLACK FRIDAY (Biggest Sale of the Year): 25% OFF on All Books, Workbooks, Dialogues, Stories, Exercises, Activities, Grammar, … Frequently Asked Questions – Teaching English Abroad Our Programs. Roleplays are obviously important for practise of answering questions in immigration, in a car hire company, etc as well. If you have a question about the English language and would like to ask one of our many English teachers and language experts, please click the button below to let us know: Summary: Tips on presenting and practising making questions in English, including wh- questions, yes/ no questions, subject questions and indirect questions/ embedded questions, By: Alex Case | However, in questions, short answers and negatives it follows exactly the same rules as an auxiliary verb like “do” and “can”. What students need to know about question formation. learning English. Especially with young and/ or low-level learners, I often put no headings in the five-column table. authors and contributors. Teachers often give students plenty of time to practice answering questions without dedicating sufficient practice time to asking them. For example, students will need to ask each other questions in order to draw personal information like their partner’s family tree, how to get from their partner’s house to where they are now, and the layout of the inside of their partner’s house. For speaking practice this is easy because interview activities and model dialogues will certainly include both. The advantage of teaching English at home is that you can use everyday situations and real objects from around the house to practise the language naturally and in context. The ability to answer WH questions is important, in all settings: school, home, in conversation, etc… I knew this, but I always wondered how to teach WH questions without feeling like I was testing the kiddo. Our online discussion forums are the perfect place to quickly get help For example, if someone asks “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” and you answer “Two brothers”, that is short for “(I have) two brothers” and so the short basic answer (and the important new info) is the object of the whole sentence answer. 2 – “I need English for my job. Example questions might be “Do you like blue? The topics that are covered are:-Personal information questions Introducing yourself and saying hello Shopping questions Challenge small groups or pairs to re order. You can find the exercises at the bottom of the page. Starting by giving students questions to ask each other is also the best way of starting the topic of subject questions. Practice activities should also include both structures. As well as showing them how easy it is to really communicate in English, this should plant plenty of evidence in their brains that they can use when you later ask them to work out the rules of question formation. And if you are interested in more, you should follow our Facebook page where we share more about creative, non-boring ways to teach English. In both indirect and reported questions, “if/ whether” has the implied meaning of “or not”, as in “He asked me if I was Chinese or not”. The second major exception to “(Wh…) + auxiliary verb + subject + main verb (+…)?” is indirect questions such as “Can I ask where the toilets are?” and “I’d like to know what the problem is”, which are more indirect and therefore more polite versions of “Where are the toilets?” and “What is the problem?” These follow the rule “indirect question starter + wh- + S (+ aux) + main verb (+…) (?)”. For structures where students have to compose their own responses such as “What’s your favorite sport?” it makes sense that students would be more concerned with what they should say in response. This also involves passing things. It actually involves teaching the future with WILL and the future with GOING TO, plus teaching students to understand when they should use each. In indirect questions which do end in a question mark like “Can I ask…?”, the question part with “aux + S + main verb” is the indirect question starter, so the rest of the sentence doesn’t need to be written that way. During this lesson you will learn how to ask basic questions and how to answer them. career development, specialisations, and ideas and suggestions for Teaching ESL in Taiwan FAQs This is a compilation of questions from our teachers that we have collected over the years. Correct the sentence matching as a class. terms, irregular verbs, phrasal verbs and idioms. Show (But Don’t Tell) Teaching English to beginners material doesn’t have to be uncool! teaching and reference resources. Reason on a subject. tips, exam tips and help with study skills. The same thing can also work for indirect questions. excellent online English training course. Alternatively, especially with young learners there is often no need to present this point at all until they have problems converting their knowledge into question formation in another tense such as Past Simple. In “Where are you from?” and “Are you hungry?” there is only one verb, so “be” is technically the main verb. Over 10 percent of students in the United States—more than 4.8 million kids—are English language learners (ELLs), and the number is on the rise. If you have a study guide for students, make sure that students write their answers to questions as well as complete the questions. You may require a CELTA or DELTA degree in some countries – both of these are credentialing courses for those who teach English as a second language. This can be written as: This same pattern will work when you later do more complicated tenses like “What is your mother doing right now?”, “When did you last eat ice cream?”, and “Have you ever seen anyone famous?” As the use of brackets around “Wh-” above is supposed to show, Yes/ No questions are exactly the same, but without the initial question word. I would like to study business English and also work on my presentation skills, etc.” For students who want to study business English (or a more specific field such as legal English), I suggest a textbook to the student. There are also many games which don’t necessarily involve realistic practice of things they have to do outside the classroom but do prompt lots of (hopefully grammatically correct) question formation. This will make them more aware of often overlooked words in questions. My post about teaching your child where questions was a big hit so today I’m going to write about answering who questions! Let’s go over the procedure of teaching the Simple Future Tense step by step. Even with young and low-level learners, it is quickly possible to get students to ask their own questions, be it “What’s your favourite candy?”, “Do you want an elephant?”, or something more serious. A simpler way of stopping repetition is to give points for new questions and/ or take points off for repeating something that someone has already asked. Luckily, asking questions is a useful skill for almost any situation—not just for language learning. Which flavour ice cream do you like best? This is great for showing students that anyone can really communicate in English. The same thing can also be done with lists of question starters (“Which”, “How long”, “How many people”, “Do”, etc), topics (“weather”, “hometown”, etc) and key words (“old”, “far”, etc). Use social media. How to teach IELTS. Lying is another kind of activity that naturally brings up questions a lot. There are almost infinite possibilities for activities to practise asking each other questions, especially if you include specific games on embedded questions, yes/ no questions, etc. links to online dictionaries. from students and teaching forum topics. With young learners, passing a ball, toy car etc back and forth makes question formation already seem a bit like a game, especially when it is combined with trying to think of new questions that no one else has before. Ask questions about important rather than trivial content. To make this contrast clearer, the kinds of “basic questions” explained above can more properly be referred to as “object questions” when it becomes time to explain subject questions. This means that the part after the wh- word changes word order to become like an SV statement. P.S. The main exception at this basic level is questions with just the verb “be”. Perhaps my favourite kind of activity for question formation is students trying to get one particular kind of answer by asking the right kind of question. Learning a new language can be hard work, so here are 70 practical tips for improving your English that you can do outside of school or collage. It’s a little trickier when it comes to converting Yes/ No questions into indirect questions, as “if” or “whether” needs to go in place of the Wh- word, as in “Could you tell me if/ whether I need to bring ID?” (from “Do I need to bring ID?”) However, some students might have seen the same thing in reported questions like “He asked me if I was Chinese”, and in fact there are situations in which a question is both a reported question and an indirect question such as “My boss would like to know when the project will be finished”. Find some pictures of objects (or real objects instead of … Student directed: student choice of topics. (Wh…) + auxiliary verb + subject + main verb (+…)? A more complicated version is Answer Me, in which they try to get the answer which is on a card, which is on a worksheet or which they have written down, e.g. Ask rhetorical questions that stimulate a mental response or curiosity. Some drawing games work well for this point. In addition, it provides an opportunity for students to observe word usage and to practice what they have learned. trying to get the answer “Sometimes” by coming up with the question “How often do you feel tired in the morning?” Something similar can also be done with Answers on the Board, in which the other person writes down five to twelve personal answers like “Southeast London” and “12 years”. These are some examples of embedded questions: Could you tell me where the bank is? Perhaps the most important communicative skill for students is to be able to ask the teacher and each other questions. English Teachers employ teaching styles to make lessons interesting and ensure that information is remembered. A more natural activity is for one person to give a mini-presentation on something and the other students to ask as many different questions as they can afterwards to get more details. Learn telephoning phrases with over 100 pages of stimulating self-study practice in preparation for your and moderators, we have a number of professional volunteer English The easiest way to do this is to give them a list of suitable (and maybe unsuitable) questions which they tick off and then can’t be used by anyone else. Ask an intriguing question to introduce a key thought. English language resources for English learners and teachers to help For less personal but even more intensive practice, you can also do a drawing dictation, where one person explains the picture in front of them for the other person to draw, with the second person asking questions to find out anything that isn’t clear. The process to getting to that point will be quite an endeavor, and you might be anxious about the upcoming ESL teacher interview questions. Make questions part of general review material and activities before exams or quizzes by dedicating a section to them. If you want to learn English grammar or grow your vocabulary then these resources will help you with your studies. When using an indirect question, use an introductory phrase followed by the question itself in positive sentence structure. Test your knowledge of the English language. Activate your free month of lessons (special offer for new How + adjective (“How far”, “How wide”, etc). At other times, you may want to avoid scary words by just using “v” and “V” for auxiliary and main verb and/ or call that “v” a “helping verb” or “grammar verb” instead of “auxiliary verb”. To present and practise small talk questions, students will need more practise of meeting for the first time than you can realistically have with just new students, as well as conversations with people not in class like foreign colleagues and fellow travellers. Who gave you chocolates on Valentine’s Day. During the introduction of new materials, you can ask the target question when trying to elicit vocabulary. You should insist on full short answers when they ask each other Yes/ No questions like “Do you like strawberries?” and “Can you speak Spanish?”, as they need the auxiliary verbs in “Yes, I do” and “No, I can’t” to make the questions and to later explain how English questions are made. How to Teach English – the 10 Most Helpful Pieces of Advice If you have studied an ESL teaching course you were probably given a lot of advice on how to teach English by tutors, and by well-meaning friends, colleagues or strangers. For example, you could ask them to choose suitable direct questions like “How was your day?” and suitable indirect questions like “Can I ask if where you are from?”, but completely avoid taboo questions like “How old are you?”/ “I’d like to know how old you are”. To justify this, you can show that “How many times a week do you get up late?” basically means “How often do you get up late?” and that when the context is clear “Which flavour ice cream is your favourite?” can be simplified to “Which is your favourite?”. In addition to the UsingEnglish.com team of staff Also includes “Be” also works in exactly the same way when it is an auxiliary in “What is he doing?” and “Is this working?” You could therefore perhaps fudge the question by saying that in “Where are the pens?”, “be” is basically both an auxiliary and the main verb. To expand the range of questions that they ask each other, you basically need to do something to stop them repeating the same few questions. There are many more specific practice ideas on the articles on this site on teaching personal questions to kids, how questions, yes/ no questions, subject questions, and indirect questions. Outside the classroom, as well as the small talk questions mentioned above, students will need to be able to ask and answer more transactional questions in the post office, in their jobs, in their studies, etc. 2020 Students are going to have to be able to both ask and answer questions when given the opportunity to speak English outside the classroom so teachers need to devote plenty of time to question related activities. Asking and answering questions over 100 basic English questions What will I learn from the basic English questions lesson? There are embedded questions and embedded sentences. Connect the two phrases with the question word or 'if' in the case the question is a yes/no question. Giulio Sorro, a trained history teacher at another school where I coach, was suddenly charged with creating a humanities (English and social studies) curriculum. Model dialogues and role-plays can be adapted to give students more practice forming questions. | Topic: Questions, First Published: 12th Jun. If the topic is “fruits”, they have to think of as many fruits … Introduce Questions and Answers Together. If this is too challenging you can have students match questions with answers or, better yet, fill in blanks within the question. (Self and Caregivers) To start teaching who questions we will start with simply asking “who’s this” when pointing either at your child, yourself, or another caregiver. You can also do basically the same thing with one point for each “No” answer or each “I don’t know” answer. During the introduction of new materials, you can ask the target question when trying to elicit vocabulary. While there are no real preliminary requirements for IELTS teachers, often an English degree and teaching experience at some level are recommended. Includes helpful articles, a glossary, quizzes, and a large language reference. you study, learn and teach English including text analysis, language The latest e-books providing you with interactive classroom activities. Don’t worry – I’m going to teach you a simple … Teaching Children Read to your child. Read to your child as often as possible. | Category: Forming questions in English can be confusing. You can then move onto a grammar presentation of whatever parts of question formation you want to present by asking students to recall and analyse the questions that they were just asking each other. These exercises will help students practice question structures more extensively. An English Teacher teaches reading, writing and speaking skills to students from Elementary School through to High School. | Last Edited: 14th Jun. An Embedded question is a question that is reported to other people in speech or writing, rather than the exact words of the original question.. If your child seems to know what some things are called (she is able to label them or talks about them when not being asked a question), then you can teach her how to answer the question appropriately instead of repeating it. Toddlers have a short attention span and lose interest in activities very quickly. This change in word order is easiest to explain in indirect questions like “I’d like to know…” which are not grammatically questions, and so obviously both end with a full stop (not a question mark) and follow the same word order as any other SV statement. Ask a balance of referential and display questions. After teaching English abroad, you could even segue into different career fields in education, government, administration, and more with the skills you’ll gain. Prepare, prepare, prepare. day. Download our compiled lists of idioms - perfect to use offline for reference or for use in class! How many times a week do you get up late? Copyright © 2002 - 2020 UsingEnglish.com Ltd. getting them to ask the same questions back to you and/ or on to the next person, getting them to choose what to ask you or each other from a list of options, getting them to make their own variations on those questions, allowing them to ask any questions they like. First, think of a topic. And while on the subject of the future - teaching the Future Simple tense (will - future) is not as simple as it sounds. Written by Alex Case for UsingEnglish.com, Featured Written exercises usually make students focus on answering the questions and not on the questions themselves. For example, if the answer to “Who recommended this school to you?” is “John”, that is short for “John (recommended this school to me)” and so the short basic answer (and the important new information) is the subject of the whole sentence. For “How’s the weather?” students may be tempted to say something similar to “What weather?” as the target question because many questions in beginning and intermediate English lessons start with what and because they recognize the word weather as the word that links it to the answer. including advice, tutorials, opinions and lesson plans from various You can also play Fruit Basket by asking the student in the middle to say a question and having everyone who would answer “Yes” change seats. Help your listeners to follow the logic of an argument by posing a series of questions that lead to a reasonable conclusion. users, with no obligation to buy) - and receive a level assessment! The other students then take turns trying to get one of those answers with questions like “Where were you born?”. Short activities. One person passes a pen and asks a question for the next person to answer. This way, students will hear it while they are focusing on the structure of the answer and after practicing the target answer you can go back and do some pronunciation practice with the question too. Find out what kind of questions could be asked and prepare professional …

how to teach questions in english

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