Liceo Cultural Britanico

Student: Cynthia Randerath

Observation 3
“The language of questions”
From “Classroom Observation Tasks” by Ruth Wajnryb

Level: Intermediate (4th form)

Place: Colegio Paula Montal
Number of students: 6
Duration: 60 minutes

During this lesson I could collect the following questions (the first 8
questions were about a reading they were dealing with):

1) What was surprising for them?

2) What did they discover when they went deep into water?
3) Is there anything you don’t understand in the text?
4) Is there any piece of information that has called your attention?
5) Do you think that it is the first time for this lady in an expedition
like this?
6) What does she do?
7) What is her job?
8) Would you like to be a scientist?

After working with the text the teacher made students underline 2
sentences and asked:
9) What do these 2 sentences have in common?
10)Do you think that adjectives can be used in any order?
11)Look at the rule, which order do they follow?
12)Do these 2 sentences follow the rule?
13)Can you complete the chart?
14)Can you think of more examples?
15)Which adjectives can you find for opinion, size, age etc.?

After the lesson

 The questions mentioned above can be classified in the

following way:

Short answer/retrieval style questions: 1, 2, 6, 7, 9

Checking understanding: 3, 5, 11, 12
Opinion: 4, 10
Referential questions: 8.
Checking learning: 13, 14,15.
 I could not find a specific pattern in these questions. Maybe,
what most of them have in common is that they make the
learner think and make the learner be more involved in the
lesson. I think that questions are a main characteristic of
teaching and many learners enjoy having the possibility to
answer these questions. Generally, in my lessons I use lots of
questions and I realized that in this way students participate
more, even the shy ones.

 In this lesson in particular, students found more difficult to

answer the questions about the reading than the others. This
does not mean that they could not find the answers, but
sometimes it took them more time to get the right answer.
However, they understood all the questions perfectly well.

 Unfortunately, it was not possible to record question and

answer set, because in many cases students answered in
Spanish or gave very short answers. In the case of the reading
comprehension they gave just the answer for that question,
only when they were asked about their opinion they talked more
but only in Spanish.

 “ The teacher must have a clear and explicit understanding of

the nature of the challenge to students´internal representation
of knowledge that a particular question may present … They
must appreciate the level of cognitive difficulty involved in the
students´effort to respond to a particular question.”
(Tollefson 1989)
I agree with this quotation, mainly because I think that
whenever teachers make questions students make a big effort
to answer them in a correct way. Besides, some questions can
be more difficult than others and students generally try to
understand them and answer them no matter how difficult it
might look.

REFLECTION

After observing this lesson I realized that questions in our lessons

can be powerful resources. Not only to check learning and
understanding but also to keep students attention and involvement
in the lesson. Also they can help us know our students more
(because sometimes we ask about their lives and beliefs). In my
short experience, at least the group of adults I have at the
moment, enjoy more the lesson when me or other students ask
questions. We should not forget that they can ask questions by
themselves and this can be also useful to improve communication
and relationships in the classroom.