Publicação
Concept questions: an effective way of checking understanding of meaning
| Resumo: | When teaching English as a foreign language it is quite recurrent to ask the following question: ‘Do you understand?’ in order to get feedback on grammar issues or vocabulary comprehension, for example. The most common answer to this question is, most of the times, ‘yes’ which is obviously quite uninformative. Normally, students answer ‘yes’ because they don’t want to look unwise or because they think they understand. However, this very traditional technique is not effective when it comes to understanding the meaning of language items students are learning. We believe concept questions do the trick here. Albeit concept questions are not new, they are still unknown to many teachers. Therefore, this workshop’s main aim is to introduce concept questions as the most effective method of checking understanding of vocabulary items and of more complicated language or grammatical structures. Even though they also require ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers, the key point is to avoid the ‘do you understand?’ question. |
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| Autores principais: | Silva, Elisabete Mendes |
| Assunto: | Concept questions Teaching foreign languages Checking meaning |
| Ano: | 2015 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | documento de conferência |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Instituto Politécnico de Bragança |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Biblioteca Digital do IPB |
| Resumo: | When teaching English as a foreign language it is quite recurrent to ask the following question: ‘Do you understand?’ in order to get feedback on grammar issues or vocabulary comprehension, for example. The most common answer to this question is, most of the times, ‘yes’ which is obviously quite uninformative. Normally, students answer ‘yes’ because they don’t want to look unwise or because they think they understand. However, this very traditional technique is not effective when it comes to understanding the meaning of language items students are learning. We believe concept questions do the trick here. Albeit concept questions are not new, they are still unknown to many teachers. Therefore, this workshop’s main aim is to introduce concept questions as the most effective method of checking understanding of vocabulary items and of more complicated language or grammatical structures. Even though they also require ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers, the key point is to avoid the ‘do you understand?’ question. |
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