Asking and Answering Questions

A daily activity in every classroom is the asking and answering of questions. There are many purposes for asking questions including, the following: to actively engage the students in the lesson, to create interest in the topic and to develop the students’ critical thinking abilities. Unfortunately, teachers are sometimes unaware of the most beneficial approaches to implementing this activity, and that the techniques which they do employ might, in fact, be inhibiting student participation and learning.

What is the purpose behind asking questions?

Teachers ask questions for several purposes, and for that reason they may formulate their questions in various ways. There are many ways of categorizing questions, and we will review several approaches in this section of the web-site.

The simplest way to distinguish between types of questions is the difference between display questions and referential questions. A display question is a question for which for which the answer is obvious; for example, what is this colour? Or how many arms do I have? The purpose of a display question is to allow the student to show that they know and can express the answer in the target language. A referential question, on the other hand, poses a problem for which the answer is not obvious and may be unknown to the teacher and student alike. The purpose of this type of question is to discover the unknown information.

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What are some different types of questions?

In his article Questioning Strategies to Improve Student Thinking and Comprehension, J.B. Slack identifies several different types of questions which teachers can use to assist students process new information or review previous material:

Refocusing questions are used when learners are off-task or in a transition to a new topic,
Clarifying questions are used if the learner’s answer was not clear, if the teacher is looking for a different answer or if the teacher wants the answer expressed differently,
Verifying questions are used to elicit more detail and clarification,
Narrow the focus questions are used to refocus answers within a narrower framework; that is, to restrict the content of the answers,
Supporting questions are used to assist students in establishing connections and relationships between concepts.

Teachers should consider preparing some questions in advance. This would benefit the students since it would ensure that various types of questions with differing levels of difficulty and complexity would be explored. It is advisable to keep Bloom’s Taxonomy in mind when preparing questions. This would oblige the teacher to consider the type of information they are seeking to elicit with the question.

What is the ideal wait time when asking questions?

Two types of wait time are apparent in a classroom setting. One type of wait time is the time between asking a question and getting an answer from a student. The second type of wait time concerns the length of time that the teacher allows to pass after a student stops speaking before the teacher speaks up, again. Some studies have shown that the average wait time allowed by teachers is less than a second, which does not allow much opportunity for students to internalize the discussion. A wait time of 3 to 5 seconds has been found to result in higher student performance standards. Waiting those extra few seconds can produce several other positive outcomes including, the following:

Improved student retention,
Increased length of student responses,
More unsolicited student responses,
Increased contributions by students who normally would not with a wait time of under 3 seconds, and;
Fewer student interruptions.

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What are some strategies for answering questions?

In addition to evaluating their techniques of posing questions, teachers should also actively assess their techniques of answering questions, as well. Teachers should consider whether to answer questions directly, indirectly or not answer the question at all and redirect it to someone else.

This website offers many examples of ways to answer or redirect student questions in order to best facilitate learning:
http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/askquest.htm

As we can see the process of posing and answering questions, whether by the teacher or by the students, is of critical importance in the language classroom. All students need to be made to feel comfortable asking questions, even if the answer has already been covered. The teacher must acknowledge the value of each question. Students should be given plenty of opportunity to ask questions, so that they do not need to be constantly interrupting the class to ask something. All of these considerations may be facilitated if the teacher provides an opportunity for the student to ask questions at regular intervals. By demonstrating the necessary patience to indulge students’ curiosity, a teacher will create a ‘question-friendly’ environment, and this would go a long way toward creating a ‘student-friendly’ classroom.