IATEFL+Glasgow+Reflection+by+Neşe

**GLASGOW 2012 ** **IN SEARCH OF ANSWERS WHY QUESTIONS MATTER ** **Fatma O’Neill **
 * IATEFL **

This session focuses on the types of questions prevalent in today’s ELT classroom and the measures teachers can take to ensure their questions elicit the type of language they want their learners to produce. It informs us to what extent does the quality of a learner’s answer depend on the quality of the questions. In this session she talks about typologies and taxonomies, display and referential questions, the purposes of question types, and the role of teacher learner discourse. She mentions that, on average, teachers ask between 300 and 400 questions per day and talks about two types of taxonomies; Paul’s Taxonomy and Bloom’s Taxonomy. Paul’s Taxonomy includes (1) questions of clarification, (2) questions that probe assumptions, (3) questions that probe reasons and evidence, (4) questions about viewpoints or perspectives, (5) questions that probe implications and consequences, and (6) questions about the question. When it comes to Bloom he states that the major purpose in constructing a taxonomy of educational objectives is to facilitate communication, and he includes six items in his taxonomy as:
 * **Knowledge **: who, what, when, where, why, how..? Describe...?
 * **Comprehension **: retell...
 * **Application **: How is...an example of...?; how is...related to...?; why is...significant?
 * **Analysis **: What are the parts or features of...? Classify...according to...;
 * **Synthesis **: What would you infer from...? What ideas can you add to...? How would you design a new..? What would happen if you combined...? What solutions would you suggest for...?
 * **<span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Evaluation **<span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">: Do you agree that...? What do you think about...? What is the most important..? Place the following in order of priority...? How would you decide about...? What criteria would you use to assess...?

<span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Then, the speaker gives information about display questions and referential questions. Firstly, display questions are asked to see if the person somebody is speaking to knows the answer or not. Questions like //What does…. mean?// //<span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">When do we use …..? and What’s the opposite of ….? //<span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Can be the examples of display questions. Secondly, referential questions are asked because the person who asks the question doesn’t know the aswer. For example; //<span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">How many hours do you sleep a day? What did you do last weekend? Who is your favourite character in the story? //<span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Here we can see that the purposes of questions are different. These purposes can be (1) noticing questions, (2) concept checking questions, (3) form based questions(3) strategy based questions, (4) feedback questions, and (5) classroom management questions. <span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">As a result, we learn from this session that good questions will provide modelsfor students to create their own intelligent questions, quality is more important than quantity when asking questions, asking questions need preperation but this is neglected in teacher training, and lastly, those questions provides useful focus for peer observations.

<span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">When it comes to my ideas about this session, I think it is beneficial for teachers and everybody to know how to ask questions to get the desired answers. It is very important for theachers how to ask questions because sometimes it is difficult for students to understand what the teacher asking and they cannot know what type of an answer for the question, consequently causing low performance of students. In terms of this aspect, I agree with the speaker about her idea that quality of questions is important. If teachers ask questions cleverly and if the questions enable students to give an enough explanation of the desired answer, theachers don’t have to ask more questions. I also approve the speaker about giving place for the types of taxonomoies. I think she made a good point bu touching on Bloom’s statement about facilitating communication. <span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Source: <span style="font-family: Cambria,serif; font-size: 12pt;">[]