When we want to be more polite we often use indirect question forms. 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. teachers and language experts ready to answer your questions 24 hours a Social media is a great way to teach English as a second language for beginners. 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. They ask the same as direct questions but are considered more formal. 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. 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”. The topics that are covered are:-Personal information questions Introducing yourself and saying hello Shopping questions Find some pictures of objects (or real objects instead of … Like good teaching, effective coaching often involves the modeling of best practices. authors and contributors. excellent online English training course. Luckily, asking questions is a useful skill for almost any situation—not just for language learning. There are also individual articles on this site on personal questions for kids, how questions, yes/ no questions, subject questions, and indirect questions. Once your lesson plans start including more of these, students will have better success remembering and using questions. 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. Jumble the words of the questions and write on one worksheet or on slips of paper in an envelope. 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. grammar, spelling and punctuation, through to language teaching, 2 – “I need English for my job. Reason on a subject. Run through the questions scoring two points for each correctly ordered question. Introduce Questions and Answers Together. Our online discussion forums are the perfect place to quickly get help As I said above, the first step towards presenting question formation is simply to get students asking you and each other questions. from students and teaching forum topics. These exercises will help students practice question structures more extensively. UsingEnglish.com is partnering with Gymglish to give you a free one-month trial of this 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). Perhaps the most important communicative skill for students is to be able to ask the teacher and each other questions. 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. Save hours of lesson preparation time with the Entire BusyTeacher Library. the classroom. learning English. 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. When using an indirect question, use an introductory phrase followed by the question itself in positive sentence structure. Here are some ideas to help students focus on this more. including advice, tutorials, opinions and lesson plans from various 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”. WH questions are very common in English.The lesson below shows you how to use them correctly. If you enjoyed this article, please help spread it by clicking one of those sharing buttons below. However, in questions, short answers and negatives it follows exactly the same rules as an auxiliary verb like “do” and “can”. In “Where are you from?” and “Are you hungry?” there is only one verb, so “be” is technically the main verb. Do you use English in your work/ studies? Includes helpful articles, a glossary, quizzes, and a large language reference. In contrast, in the more common basic questions mentioned first above, the short answer is the object of a full-sentence response. An English Teacher teaches reading, writing and speaking skills to students from Elementary School through to High School. Written exercises usually make students focus on answering the questions and not on the questions themselves. 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”. Teach English in Taiwan The following links cover information pertaining to teacher salaries, the cost of living in Taiwan, visa issues, and more. The process to getting to that point will be quite an endeavor, and you might be anxious about the upcoming ESL teacher interview questions. 2020 Also includes Forming questions in English can be confusing. Give each group the sentence halves (which you have cut into strips prior to the lesson) and ask them to match them. And while on the subject of the future - teaching the Future Simple tense (will - future) is not as simple as it sounds. Use social media. You can ask questions at work , at home, in the classroom, at restaurants , while shopping, while out with your friends , etc. Let’s get started with the lesson. Can you tell me a little about yourself? Also provides access to questions During this lesson you will learn how to ask basic questions and how to answer them. 2020. 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. 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. 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. Ask questions about important rather than trivial content. 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. How many times a week do you get up late? 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 … 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. terms, irregular verbs, phrasal verbs and idioms. 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. 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. Are you a student?” This can be used for many different question structures and levels. Written by Alex Case for UsingEnglish.com, Featured 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. BLACK FRIDAY (Biggest Sale of the Year): 25% OFF on All Books, Workbooks, Dialogues, Stories, Exercises, Activities, Grammar, … Some drawing games work well for this point. Download our compiled lists of idioms - perfect to use offline for reference or for use in class! 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. 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. As you can see, you’ll need to know how to ask questions in English to be curious. (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 find the exercises at the bottom of the page. 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. How to teach IELTS. Short activities. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Drill, repeat, drill, repeat, drill… Beginners need lots of repetition and drilling, especially as they get to … 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. 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. 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 | Asking and answering questions over 100 basic English questions What will I learn from the basic English questions lesson? 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. Asks the same as direct questions but are considered more formal you want to learn English grammar terms, verbs! 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