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LCB-TTC – Taller didáctico

Teacher: Gladys Baya


Student: María Pérez Armendáriz

Observation
Language of Questions1
Date: October 15, 2008.
No. of students: 7.
Age: ± 16.
Level: Upper-Intermediate.
Book: Language to go 3, Longman Pearson.

Background
Language teachers ask a lot of questions. Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) found that questions are
one of the commonest types of utterances in the discourse of classrooms. Questions can have
different purposes, for example, socializing, scene setting, checking vocabulary, checking learning
and seeking opinion. While teachers often plan their questions in terms of the lesson's content, they
seem to place less emphasis on considering their questions in terms of the cognitive and linguistic
demands made on the learner. These demands relate to both decoding the question and encoding the
response.

Observation notes
Single questions:
1. What do you call tension in a film?
2. What do we have to do in the next exercise?
3. Which style do you prefer and why?
4. Why don't you like the second?
5. Who wears their hair hiding an eye?
6. What is scruffy?
7. Can you describe one of the women in the picture with as much detail as possible?
8. And underneath the jacket, what is she wearing?
9. What's the English word for that?
10. What do we have to do? Can you read the instructions?
11. Does your mood affect your choice of clothes?
12. Remember what I told you about wasting time?
13. Anything else boys about violet?
14. Anything else about orange?
15. What does it mean, that they go through a 'black stage'?
16. Have we included the word 'inspired' in the chart?

Question-answer sets:
1. T: What do you call tension in a film?
S: Suspense.

2. T: Why don't you like the second?


S: She has big trousers. I don't like her shoes.

1
Topic taken from Classroom Observation Tasks, Ruth Wajnryb, (CUP, 1992).

LCB-TTC – Taller Didáctico – Observation 7 – María Pérez Armendáriz 1


3. T: Who wears their hair hiding an eye?
S: The emos.

4. T: What is the other one wearing?


S: She's wearing baggy trousers.

5. T: Does your mood affect your choice of clothes?


S: No. I always wear the uniform.

Analysis
1. Looking first at the single questions you have collected, consider these from the point of
view of the expected response. It may help to write in a sample response for each question.

2. Now classify the questions into categories on the basis of the expected response. Some
suggested categories are given below. There is some overlap among these, and of course other
categories might be used instead of or in addition to these. You may like to set up a number of
binary categories and classify questions accordingly, for example, questions that require
students to share previous knowledge, versus those that require information just presented; or
questions for which the teacher is seeking a 'form' answer versus questions where the teacher
is interested in the meaning of the response.
Here are some other question types. It may help to decide first on the framework you will
be working with.
- Yes/No questions, e.g. 'Here is a picture of a woman. Have you seen her face before?'
7. Can you describe one of the women in the picture with as much detail as possible?
10. What do we have to do? Can you read the instructions?
11. Does your mood affect your choice of clothes?
12. Remember what I told you about wasting time?
13. Anything else boys about violet?
14. Anything else about orange?
16. Have we included the word 'inspired' in the chart?

- Short answer/ retrieval style questions, e.g. 'What did she say about the film?'
1. What do you call tension in a film?
5. Who wears their hair hiding an eye?
6. What is scruffy?
8. And underneath the jacket, what is she wearing?
9. What's the English word for that?
10. What do we have to do? Can you read the instructions?

- Open-ended questions, e.g. 'Whom could he have telephoned?'


3. Which style do you prefer and why?
4. Why don't you like the second?
15. What does it mean, that they go through a 'black stage'?

- Display questions (questions requesting information already known to the questioner), e.g.
'What color is this pen?'
7. Can you describe one of the women in the picture with as much detail as possible?
8. And underneath the jacket, what is she wearing?

LCB-TTC – Taller Didáctico – Observation 7 – María Pérez Armendáriz 2


- Referential questions (questions requesting new information), e.g. 'What did you study at
university?'
2. What do we have to do in the next exercise?
15. What does it mean, that they go through a 'black stage'?

- Non-retrieval, imaginative questions (questions that do not require the learner to retrieve
given information but instead call on inferred information or information in which an opinion
or judgment is called for), e.g. 'What do you think the writer was suggesting by making the
central character an animal?'
3. Which style do you prefer and why?
4. Why don't you like the second?

Added category:
- Rhetorical questions.
12. Remember what I told you about wasting time?

3. What pattern, if any, emerges from the classification of your questions? Can you point to
any factors that might help account for this, for example, the type of lesson it was, the stage of
the lesson from which the questions came, the age of the students, etc.?
Most of the questions were of the Yes/No type. However, they were not meant to provide a simple
yes/no answer. There was an implied request for elaboration on the answer. Most of the work was
done with images from the course book. The teacher knew that they students would not elaborate on
an open question if she asked it directly, so she used these types of questions to get a short answer
so as to follow up with a why? or how? to get more information. The level of the students was
intermediate, but they were a shy group, so they did not volunteer many answers. Several times, the
teacher had to select a student when a question addressed to the whole class got no answer.

4. Consider the notion of difficulty from the learners point of view. Rank a selection of your
collected questions on to a cline of easy → more difficult → difficult. What are the factors that
increase difficulty?
I think that the easiest were the Yes/No questions, simply because they are more familiar with the
structures and a short answer would suffice. Display questions are simple and the answer if right in
front, so there is not much difficulty. Open ended questions were a bit more difficult since the
students fear that although there may be more than one answer, theirs may be wrong; I think it is a
matter of shyness than understanding the question and answering. Referential questions are difficult
in the sense that they require the student not only to understand what it is that the teacher is asking
for, but also that they are able to find that information; these type demands more from the student.
Another type that may be more difficult are Non-retrieval, imaginative questions. These demand
more elaboration in an answer and exposing their opinions; teens are not fond of (and used to)
expressing their feelings in front of an audience, no matter how small.

5. Consider now the question-and-answer sets you have recorded. Rank the five in order of
complexity of response so that (1) will be the response requiring the least challenge to the
student and (5) will be the response requiring the greatest challenge.

(5) T: Does your mood affect your choice of clothes?


S: No. I always wear the uniform.

(4) T: What do you call tension in a film?


S: Suspense.

LCB-TTC – Taller Didáctico – Observation 7 – María Pérez Armendáriz 3


(3) T: What is the other one wearing?
S: She's wearing baggy trousers.

(2) T: Who wears their hair hiding an eye?


S: The emos.

(1) T: Why don't you like the second?


S: She has big trousers. I don't like her shoes.

6. Is there any correlation between the type of question and the complexity of response elicited?
Yes. All questions were aiming a specific short answer. Except for one of the sets, the teacher meant
to elicit simple answers so as to get it and continue with another one. They seemed to be guiding
questions to take the students from one topic to the next. The why? question was the only one that
required a longer answer, simply because a justification must be somewhat longer and contain an
explanation.

7. What comment can you make on this remark:


The teacher must have a clear and explicit understanding of the nature of the challenge to students'
internal representation of knowledge that a particular question may present ... they must appreciate
the level of cognitive difficulty involved in the students' effort to respond to a particular question.
(Tollefson, 1989)
All of us have gone to school (primary, secondary, etc), and as students we lamented our teachers'
inability to placed themselves in our shoes. Whenever they asked something, since they already
knew the answer or had an answer in mind, they seemed to have forgotten (as former students
themselves) how much it takes to answer correctly, accurately and in a timely fashion. This cycle
may be repeated over and over again. This quote refers to those teachers who have forgotten that
they were students once and that answering any question (particularly in a foreign language) is not
simply shooting an answer in the hope that it instinctively comes out perfectly.

Reflection
Using this observation as a mirror of your own teaching, consider how you approach the
design of questions in your lessons. Has this observation in any way increased your awareness
of the skill of questioning? If you were to pursue this line of thinking in relation to your
teaching, what aspects would you be keen to explore?
I think I learned a lot about how to go about using questions for other purposes than getting
information. They are discussion starters, opinion retrievers, involvement makers. I also tried to see
how to ask the right questions to guide a discussion in the direction I would want it go; of course,
this is a work in progress, since it takes time and plenty of practice to achieve. I would like to be
able to foster students to ask as many questions as they like. They are more used to answering than
asking, as if evaluated on every question. It should be thought of differently: they should assess
themselves by knowing how to get the information they want form others.

LCB-TTC – Taller Didáctico – Observation 7 – María Pérez Armendáriz 4

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