Brown states that "certain types of questions may actually discourage
interactive learning." Think of several real-life examples from your
own language classes (as either teacher or student) where certain types
of questions just didn't work. Discuss why.
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Questions that failed in my classes were mainly too detailed questions and inappropriate questions. For instance, sometimes my teacher would ask a really long question in Italian. Usually by the time we could mentally translate what she was even asking she'd switch questions because no one was answering.
ReplyDeleteIn my French class, the teacher called on individuals to stand in front of the class and would ask the class whether we were "short or tall" "small or large" "blonde or brunette" "pretty" etc. It was so awkward! When obviously overweight people were up there nobody would answer the questions because they did not want to offend. When short men were up there no one would answer. When less than attractive people were there, no one wanted to lie and say they were attractive but no one wanted to offend them. It was one of my worst learning experiences. No one was learning anything this way and the questions embarrassed several students.
There were a couple that I can remember. Some for example were personal, “Do you have a boyfriend?” “What are your parent’s jobs?” Questions like these I am not comfortable answering in front of a whole class (especially if I don’t know everyone), and so I just pretended I didn’t understand. I think there is a boundary to how much you can ask to a student about his/her personal life, and definitely not infront of the whole class where it might put them in an uncomfortable position. Another one that I remember and disliked was an assignment, where we had to “describe the environment, and write about pollution” or something like that, I don’t remember exactly, but just knowing what I had to write about made me NOT want to write at all. So, I think topics should be chosen carefully, they shouldn’t be boring or too open-ended. Maybe the teacher can ask the students what they would like to talk/write about first, get some ideas, and then proceed.
ReplyDeleteThis may apply mainly to classes where there are different levels of students, but in one of my German classes we were discussing art and music. As an ex-music major, I can spend hours discussing history and theory and structure in English. As a not so advanced German speaker, I am mainly limited "It is pretty" "Bach composed this song" or "It is played by an orchestra". Two seats over, a more advanced German speaker would ramble on for several minutes about the song in German and you could watch the non-native speakers lower their hands and zone out. Why on earth would we want to supply a simple, almost juvenile, answer and look like an idiot? I understand that working with speakers of various levels is a challenge for any teacher, but it would have been nice if the teacher had started with easier, more closed ended questions directed towards the lower level speakers before the open ended questions that the advanced students could expand on.
DeleteThe other problem I've noticed in more basic level classes is teachers asking questions we don't know the answer to in English. For example, My French teacher has been describing celebrities to us so we can guess who they are. After a couple of celebrities that no one in the class even knew, it felt completely pointless and I think we stopped really trying.
Kailey Watson
Sorry! I didn't realize I was replying to a specific comment! oops :(
DeleteKailey
Know your students! When I first started teaching at VMLC, I had tried to get my students to answer in English "What do you like to do when you are not at school?" as a conversation starter. To a person, they answered either "I like to cook for my family" or "I like to clean my house". I kept thinking that they just were comfortable with the cook/clean vocabulary, which was partially true. After the third week of the same answers, I started thinking about this. My life and culture is SO different (not necessarily better, just different) from theirs that it was hard for me to put myself in their shoes. I have so many more choices about what to do with my free time, and I have no problem appearing from everyone else. Once I started asking things like "What is the best thing you cook?" or "What is your child's favorite meal?" or "What special things do you cook for holidays (and there are a lot of them depending on the holiday!)?" I started getting better and wordier answers. Once I started to ask questions that were more pertinent for them we started having better discussions as they started losing their shyness, and actually lots of them like to do all sorts of things besides clean and cook but I didn't get that it probably was not culturally acceptable for them to appear as 'different' from their contemporaries when they did not know me or each other all that well.
DeleteAND I did not know them either!
DeleteI cannot remember specific situations, but I can recall questions that did not work for me or I had problems with.
ReplyDelete• Any scientific question that require a specific knowledge in a specific issue.
• Any question that requires long answer.
• Any student who would ask and requires introducing an advanced input that the class will catch up on later.
• Any student who intestinally tries to find rules’ exceptions and waste half the time of the class arguing about it.
• Any question that measures the students’ intelligence.
These questions were not comfortable for me because not being able to answer those means a lack of my general knowledge or a shallow interest of important issues. As for the students question, sometimes it is obvious that the question is not calling for an answer as much as calling for attention.
In my first ESL class, I wanted to understand my students’ motivation for learning English. The first day, I asked them about their goals. I gave them time to think about their answer and write it down. Then I was going to have everyone volunteer his answer. Since it was our first class, I think the students didn’t understand me very well. I didn’t ask my question clearly and I didn’t explain exactly what I wanted. The question was too open-ended. We didn’t really have a level of trust that made the students comfortable sharing that type of information. In the future, after the class seemed more comfortable and relaxed, I could try it again by modeling the question and answer using my desire to learn Spanish.
ReplyDeleteI have a somewhat uncomfortable experience about the question in English literature class. When I was an undergraduate student in my country, Korea, I took nineteenth century Anglo-American literature. Actually, the lecture was somewhat difficult to students because there were so many authors and literary works that we had to memorize. One day the professor asked about the year and author of one specific literary work in nineteenth century. However, nobody could not answer to the query. Then, the professor just chose one student and asked another question. This student did not answer. Again, the professor asked another specific question to another student. This student did not answer the question. Again... again… For a long time the professor continued asking specific questions in order to check students’ understanding. Maybe the professor was angry because he thought students did not study hard. This situation was very awkward and uncomfortable.
ReplyDeleteAs Dr. Cindy mentioned in last class, I experienced the same class when in college. It was the first class of the new semester and we had a new teacher who taught us intensive reading. She wanted to know students so she asked us to choose one classmate (not telling her/his name to other students) and describe her/him to others in three sentences and let others guess who she/he was. We had been along with classmates only for one semester so we didn’t want to say something embarrassing and personal. So almost everyone introduced their friends as “She/He is very pretty/handsome”, “She/He studies hard”, “She/He is very kind/nice/friend/polite/likes smile”. It was difficult for us to guess based on such descriptions. So the teacher asked us to provide more detailed and more private information, which we all thought it was very hard for us to do and may make troubles. But we had no choice and said “She/He is a little fat/skinny/slim”, “She/He has very long hair/short hair”, “She/He wears blue/black…jacket/shirt”, “She/He likes to sleep/to eat”. Facing such descriptions, we could not directly say “Oh, it’s XXX” to offend others. As a result, many students felt uncomfortable and embarrassed because their friends said something private or something wrong. And I believe the teacher cannot remember our names based on such description. I think this kind of question is not proper for students; it’s too open-ended and no boundaries. If the teacher wants to know about their students, they should first set a boundary for description.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Caitlin that teachers not giving students sufficient time to form an answer in their head is a huge problem. For me personally, even in English classrooms, I have to perfect a statement or question in my head before I have the courage to speak in front of the class. This is due to my own self-doubt and debilitating shyness in English-speaking environments, but in foreign language settings this is multiplied times 500. I understand that part of developing automaticity is being able to respond quickly in your L2, but if no one even gets a chance to answer because the teacher doesn't think anyone is going to offer a response, everyone loses. I've experienced a lot of questions that are too open-ended in my language learning experience as well. It sometimes seems as if an instructor expects you to read their mind when they propose these questions that are formed to elicit a specific answer but no one knows what it is. An example could be something like, "And what is another word we could use to talk about....." Sometimes students don't know if a specific answer is sought or if there are many options and that creates self-doubt so no one answers. Another problem I've encountered again and again in L2 classrooms is that instructors don't make sure students understand before they are given a task. Many times in L2 classrooms students miss a piece of information that's necessary to complete the task because maybe they got hung on a word they didn't understand and missed out on the main idea of the assignment. Students need to feel comfortable asking for clarifications because if they don't more often than not they just end up talking amongst themselves "So what are we supposed to be doing???" Clear instructions must be offered, and students must feel comfortable asking for clarification if the instructions fall short of this clarity.
ReplyDeleteOne question that I’ve seen fall flat in language classrooms and other subjects is “What do you think?” This question can appear very open-ended on its own, but often students do not want to answer it because they feel that the teacher is looking for one particular ‘right’ answer. In one of my freshman government classes the professor (whose teaching I otherwise quite enjoyed) made extensive use of this particular question while adding a degree of anxiety to it by singling out students. He would be lecturing on a particular topic, then stop, survey the class with a glance and ask “What do you think?” When nobody responded he would narrow his focus to a particular half of the room, then particular row, then individual student, each time repeating the question “What do you think?” As a result, people typically would not answer the question the first time, knowing it would be repeated. I also developed a habit of avoiding eye contact with the professor when I did not have any clear comments on the topic. Because of the anxiety or apathy it created, this question did not function well for starting discussions.
ReplyDeleteHowever, this question can be redeemed by simply adding some more qualifications: “What do you think about using vague questions in interactive language classrooms?” or by preceding this question with a very topic-specific discussion so that students have no doubts about what you are actually asking. Some other similar questions that have to be used with care are “Why?” and “Describe X.”
My most recent experience with questions that discouraged learning was a comparison activity in my Spanish class. We were asked to compare famous people, creating sentences like “So-and-so is richer than so-and-so.” My difficultly was that I do not follow pop culture very much and could not come up with names to replace the so-and-sos. I think the difficulty was that the questions were not over a subject which I knew very much about, so when teaching I should be careful to cover topics that interest students.
Simple yes or no questions never worked in any of my language classrooms. If the students could get away with it, they would say as little as possible while still answering the questions. Yes or no questions were helpful only in determining if the class actually understood something, but not for facilitating discussion. Although, I think this could have been by design at times, simply because the teacher had something that he or she wanted to cover, and did not have time for the class to continue talking about something.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, though, I don't really remember many instances in my language classrooms where discussion was actively encouraged. We usually would just talk about something for a few seconds before moving on. I think this probably had something to do with time constraints, and how much time we were given to get through a certain amount of the book.
I also remember that in the few instances where discussion was the goal, open ended questions seemed to kill the conversation. I think this was because, when given an open question, the students want to formulate sentences in their L1 that are simply to complex for them to express in their L2. I remember trying to answer some of these questions myself, and winding up with compound sentences with complicated ideas that I was completely unable to express in the target language. It actually got to be frustrating at times, simply because I knew what I wanted to say, but was unable to say it due to lack of ability.
In one of my Korean classes the instructor attempted to explain how to play a game. Her explanation was vague and we were confused at what we were supposed to do. When se realized she lost us she took a step back. She re-explained the instructions and then modeled the game and after that we figured out what she wanted us to do. We ended up playing the game and enjoying ourselves. Had she not taken a step back we would have never figured out what she wanted us to do.
ReplyDeleteIn one of my Italian classes the instructor had a good class discussion going and started asking rhetorical questions. One of the students hadn't realized that the question was rhetorical and attempted to answer. When the instructor said that this isn't a question that needed an answer the student seemed visibly embarrassed. The instructor noticed this and quickly turned the discussion around to show how the answer the student gave can work for the concept and thus making the student's answer a smart answer and boosting the student's confidence and motivation in class.
In both these instances the wrong questions can lead to a break down in classroom interaction but both instructors were able to see the error and correct themselves. Doing this helped the instructors save face and keep the students on track. Students could have easily become distracted and discouraged but the instructors' abilities to smooth things out and draw negative attention away for the students.
Stefani Goode
I think that display questions or questions that fall on too simple a level for the students shut down a class incredibly quickly. It's amazing how fast students can go from full engagement in a lesson to being totally zoned out. The same thing is true of questions that are too open-ended or vague. In my first teaching experience I actually did ask my students something like, "so, do you understand these things?" and watched them completely close off in confusion (while I mentally checked the 'oops - don't do that again' box in my head). I've also been on the other side of that experience, in scenarios where a teacher asked a question in such a simplistic and obvious way that I got annoyed and wanted to ask if they thought they were teaching toddlers. As a new teacher, one of the aspects of teaching I find most challenging is finding the balance between not presenting the material as I would to young children and not presenting it as I would to native speakers. There seems to be a 'happy medium' in formulating questions that I personally feel like I'm still learning to navigate.
ReplyDeleteI agree with several of the other people who talked about questions requiring background knowledge or things that aren't applicable to our students. The first university EFL class I taught in Cambodia used an ESL book (doh!). As a result, it included a lot of things that my students might need to know if they lived in America but were of no use to them at all if they stayed in Cambodia, which would be the case for most of them. I learned quickly that asking them the questions from the teacher's guide would not get me very far - not for lack of English on their part but rather because the questions were not in any way applicable to their lives.
ReplyDeleteAs a new teacher, I also learned the hard way that long, rambling questions fail miserably 100% of the time. I used to ask questions like "If you were going to go live on a deserted island with no electricity and could only take two things with you, what two things would you take with you and why?" Now if I know a question is going to require a lot of background knowledge, I try to break it into simple thoughts. So that question would become something like "Imagine you are going to live on a deserted island. It has no electricity, and you can only bring two things with you. What two things will you bring? Why?"
Open ended questions like “What do you think about what you just read/heard?” usually seem to instantly kill any kind of conversation if the topic isn’t very narrow or controversial. I had an instructor that would bring in newspaper articles from Spain and read them aloud to the class every Friday and when she was done, she would always ask “OK clase, que piensan?” (What do you think?). It took a long time before any of us were comfortable to talk about it using more than two or three words. I’ve also had experiences as a beginner student where the teacher would ask “Does anyone have any questions?” after a long technical discourse about a very specific grammar point in the target language. As a beginner I didn’t even have the vocabulary to ask a question about the subject, all I could say was “I don’t understand.” and I didn’t want to tell her for fear of looking stupid in front of my classmates. I don’t know how she could have restated the question or the information though, short of translating it. I completely agree about the very personal descriptions of other students, it shouldn’t be done that way.
ReplyDelete-Melody Bree
Questions in my spanish language courses that just didn't work for me:
ReplyDelete1. Questions that are so obvious that every student in the class would know it. Not only that, but when the teacher asks the obvious question and a student responds, the over-dramatic praise and excitement that the student receives when they get it right is outright insulting.
2. Vague questions that are filled with slang and fragmented sentences. I hated it when teachers would ask me if I understood but they said it like," So... do you underst..I mean, was that too complicated to get all at once..or should I re-explain or something..?" A simple sentence would suffice to ask if I understand or not.
3. Questions that are too wordy or complex to understand. I got a lot of these when I took some spanish literature courses. I understand that some subjects are abstract and wordy by nature, but some teachers would just continuously mouth of question after question and jumble it all into one long complicated question that was too hard to completely understand.
4. Jokes formed into questions. I'm not sure how common this is, but I had several teachers that would make sarcastic comments or jokes in the middle of explaining something. Then, they would ask a student off hand something regarding the joke in some way. Not only did this catch the students off guard and not know how to respond, but it makes the students feel stupid when they didn't get that it was a joke in the first place.
5. Rhetorical questions. I hated hated hated when teachers would ask rhetorical questions in class and make eye contact with a student. A lot of the time students don't get when something is a "rhetorical" question or just a regular question, especially when there is a long pause afterwards. It always made me nervous, and wondering whether or not I was supposed to answer.