Innovator: Khalil Zakari, https://www.linkedin.com/in/khalilzakari
Organisation: Ed-Links, Meknes
Setting of the practice: online
Description of the practice:
Typically, foreign language teachers ask more than 200 questions per day; nonetheless, the quality and value of questions vary depending on the quality of the questions he/she plans to ask during each lesson. Questioning can be an effective tool in enhancing the learner’s critical skills; thus, asking questions can be considered as both an art and a science.
A teacher of English as a foreign/second language for example, before, during or after a reading/listening activity may ask a bunch of questions classified- using Bloom’s taxonomy- in order of increasing demand- as follows:
• remembering
• understanding
• applying
• analysing
• evaluating
• creating
Empirical research has shown that an average teacher of English as a foreign/second language asks round 15% of his/her questions calling upon memory (remembering), 56% to check basic comprehension (understanding), 15% requesting the use of information in a new way (applying), 07% exploring relationships (analysing), 04% asking for judgement (evaluating) and 03% soliciting the use of information to plan, design, devise or produce creative outcomes
(creating).
The practice we seek to highlight aims to rethink our classroom questioning culture. Current textbooks which are designed to teach English for general purposes or for exam purposes very often tend to focus on basic reading/listening comprehension skills, thus, seldom integrate activities and tasks which train learners on deep learning.
An analysis of the reading texts and listening passages suggested in those textbooks or tailored by the teacher very seldom lend themselves to comprehension high order comprehension questions. Consequently, the ensuing questions rarely manage to tap on the learner’s imagination and creativity or scaffold his/her critical thing skills.
The practice of asking good questions is an essential part of critical thinking. By asking learners to collect relevant information, clarify their thoughts, gather evidence, challenge assumptions, the teacher stimulates creativity and paves the way for effective critical thinking and better problem-solving suggestions. The who, what, when, where questions (commonly referred to as display question) almost never require deep understanding of the text under scrutiny. Alternatively, the why, how do you know and what if … questions (referred to as inferential questions) have responses that are indirectly stated, induced or required other information.
The practice is both challenging for the teacher in as much as it requires a good choice of the instructional material and a thoughtful engineering of the comprehension check, which will undoubtedly invite the him/her to go beyond what is suggested in textbook, and quit the comfort zone. Teachers will have to keep Bloom’s taxonomy in mind when engineering listening and reading activities and tasks.
The practice is also challenging for learners who have not yet been trained to look at issues from different perspectives, provide an assess evidence or negotiate better choices and options. The transferability of a given practice refers to the extent to which its effectiveness can be achieved in another class sample and /or class setting. In foreign language education, developing good reading/listening strategies is vital to the learning process. Therefore, while designing subsequent activities and tasks, teachers usually follow the pre-, while- and post- paradigm. It is during the postreading/-listening phase that the design of great prompts and questions is required.
Floyd, as cited in Almeida (2010), claims that in order to benefit from questioning practice, teachers and students are invited to hold positive attitudes towards questioning in order to maintain a positive questioning culture.
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