Asking your questions
TEACHING NOTES
ACTIVITY
Students get a chance to ask each other questions, then try to guess the original questions based on a handful of answers.
GRAMMAR/VOCABULARY
Questions
LEVEL
B1 – above
TIME
30 minutes
WHAT TO DO
1. Before class, make copies of the handout (see at the end of this recipe).
2. Ask your class for some of the basic question words. As they call them out, write them on the board.
3. Next, ask for some other ways to begin a question, such as “Have you ever…” “Can you…” If the students have a difficult time, you might provide a few of these – “Did you know that…” “Would you like to…” “If…what would you do?”
4. Announce that you are going to give them an opportunity to get some information about their classmates by asking some questions they would genuinely like to hear the answer to.
5. Give each student a copy of the handout. Their task is to form questions by writing words on the left and the right of the words inside the question mark. For example, usingr the first word (ever), a student might write “Have you ever been to a night club?” or “Have you ever seen a horror movie?”
6. As students write out their questions, monitor their work. Read over their questions and help them with vocabulary and grammar.
7. When everyone has finished writing out their questions, tell them to move around the classroom and ask each question to at least four different people. Also, when they get an interesting answer, they should ask a follow-up question to get more information. Finally, they should write the most interesteing answers next to the question.
8. While they are busy, write these two questions on the board: WHO SAID IT? and WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?
9. After students have finished mingling, call on 5 students to each write one of their answers on the board. The rest of the class should look at these answers and try to answer the 2 questions on the board (WHO SAID IT? and WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?).
