Communication skills for ESL teachers

  

A fundamental to good teaching and learning are questioning. When teachers have effective questioning methods, as a significance feature of their lessons, students will most likely to:

1.                  Develop a much fuller understanding because they would try explaining it by themselves

2.                  Could easily recall their existing knowledge

3.                  They are clear on the main point of the lesson

4.                  Able to handle tasks or problems at a higher level, therefore expanding their ability to think

5.                  Able to link their prior knowledge with the ideas in the lessons

6.                  Clear about the task and knows what to expect; easily connects with the task

7.                  Be able to develop independence thinking and learning

Common issues

Students understanding of a topic or idea is usually not fully developed as the teachers would expect them to be. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds may respond with negativity to some form of questionings due to lack of self – esteem and their desire to appear respected in front of their friends. Therefore by modifying on how questions are asked will improve their interest in learning.

Handling the issues

Effective questioning is a skill that can be learned. All teachers’ questions their students, but in order to do it well, it requires an understanding and planning on how to make a student engage with the lesson and thus pushing them to think.

How can we be an effective questioner?

1. Knows how to promote responses and having students to response on questions that are given
2. Knows how to plan questions for and during learning
3. Knows how the technics used for questioning could improve students cognitive abilities
4. Knows how to avoid pitfalls and knows how to plan alternative questioning technics
5. Learn classroom tactics on how to be an effective questioner
6. Able to respond to students answers, that will encouraged them to participate more

The most important feature in the classroom are the interactions between the students and their teachers. It doesn’t matter if teachers are to help learners to learn basic skills or better understanding in solving problems, or to be engage in high level thinking, questions are vital. Questions doesn’t have to be only the teachers asking them to students it could be done the opposite way. Both is important in teaching and learning. Questioning is a principal skill that anyone can learn and use it. Therefore, ways to help students to develop their own ability and knowledge on how to raise and formulate questions could be learned. Raising questions and knowing the right questions to ask is one of the important skills that pupils need to learn.

Research into questioning has given us some clear points on how it works. These provides the basis to improving classroom practice. The common issue identified is that students are not given enough time for them to think of an answer, the other issue is, some teachers has the tendency to ask too many questions of the same type.

What is the purpose of questioning?

Teachers ask questions for several reasons.

1. To get students attention and interests
2. To challenge students thinking
3. To check on their understanding and prior knowledge
4. Stimulating their prior knowledge in order to create new meaning and understanding
5. To have students focusing on key concepts and issues
6. To extend students way of thinking from concrete and factual to evaluative and analytical
7. To lead students with planned sequences which in turn establishes key understanding
8. To nurture their way of reasoning, evaluation and problem solving
9. To promote students way of thinking on what they have learned.

Open and closed questions asked will depend on the reason for asking it. If teachers wants to check on their students understandings, they can use close questions. Close questions have only one clear answer. Example questions like, “What is the name of the main character in this story?”.

But, if we want to help our students develop a higher level of thinking skills, we should ask open ended questions. This allows the students to give variety of responses that are acceptable. Open ended questions are useful to ask during debriefings and discussions. Example questions like, “Based on the story, what moral values that we can learn from it?”. Questionings tactics is sometimes used to bring the students attention back to the lesson. For example, “Do you agree with this Gary?”.

Questioning pitfalls and solution

Even though the common form of interaction between a teacher and her students are questioning, but, sometimes, those questions are not always well said or productive for students learning.

Not clear on why the question was asked: teachers need to refer back to what kind of lesson that they are planning. Does it focuses mostly on the facts, or rules? Or sequences of actions? If that is the lesson plan, close ended question is much more suitable. It relates directly to the knowledge. But if the lesson plans are made to focus more on concepts or comprehensions, open ended questions would be more appropriate. Because it will relate students on how to analyse and evaluate.

Too many questions are asked at one time: asking about an issue that is complex will result to complex questions. And because these questions are done orally, students will find it difficult to understand what is needed and easily become confused. When dealing with complex issues, teachers need to tease out the issues first and to focus on one idea only. This helps student’s use concrete, direct language.

Asking difficult questions without constructing the students: when there is no planning of questions with increasing difficulty the above happens. Sequencing questions helps students to climb to a higher level of thinking.

Not serious in treating students answers: sometimes teachers ignores answers that is a little off topic. By doing so, they fail to see the effects of these answers and would certainly missed out the opportunity to construct on them. Teachers should ask the pupils why they gave that answer in the first place, also ask them if there is anything that they would like to add to that answer. Ask other students to help extend the answer, but it is important not to cut them off and moving on too quickly if the answer is wrong.

Dealing inefficiently with misconceptions and wrong answers: teachers’ sometime has the idea that they might risk damaging their students self – esteem if they correct them. But, there are ways of handling this, the positive way. Teachers could use scaffoldings or providing prompts to help their students correct their mistakes.

Some other practical tips for teachers when practicing questioning sessions are, teachers should be clear when asking questions. We need to make sure that the students do what we want them to do. Next is, to plan sequence of question to challenge students cognitively. Always give time for the students to answer and when necessary, provide prompts.

How to make effective questioning

Effectiveness is central to how questions are asked. All students will respond well to teachers that shows interest in their ideas and opinions. The way teachers asking the questions or listening to how students’ response is important. Good teachers always shows genuine curiosity when asking questions, this is to invite their students to think together with the teacher. For example, “How do we know that this is the correct way?”. And the way teachers respond to students’ answers are also important.

Creating an environment where students feels that there is no harm in making mistakes: This is vital. If students to build their own confidence and taking risks. To avoid students feel vulnerable, teachers may ask the students to write the answers at the same time and then hold them up so the teachers could see. And it is also vital that whatever students contributes are to be taken seriously by both teachers and the whole class. Contributions from students are listened to and taken seriously by both the teacher and the class. Ensure that the other students give proper responses and not be critical. Teachers could also model making mistakes, just to show their students that it is alright to make mistakes.

Probing: when a student’s responds to questions, probing’s are useful and can be used to dig into more informations, to clarify on their responses and to get the students to extend their answers.

Providing students the sufficient waiting time: if a teacher could spend around 3 seconds to wait for the students respond and before giving out the next questions, there are several benefits for that. Teachers could encourage students to give variety of responses and also building confident in them to take the ‘risks’.

Why is repertoire of questioning strategies important?

When students gives active responses to the learning, then the questioning is effective. As suggested by Borich 1996; Muijs and Reynolds 2001; Morgan and Saxton 1994; Wragg and Brown 2001, effective questioning has the following characteristics:

• Objectives of the lessons are linked closely with the questions prepared.
• Close end questions used to check understanding of the students
• Open end questions dominates.
• Learning of basic skills are increased by having questions that exposes new content.
• Sequences of questions are planned for the cognitive level to increase as the questioning goes on. Ensuring the students are to answer questions that needed higher thinking skills.
• Students have their own opportunity to ask and answer questions amongst them.

Their research tells us the importance of using open, higher level questions in order to develop students thinking skills. There must be a balance between open end and close end questions, but, depending on the topic or objectives of the lesson.

If students did not respond to the teachers, then there is no point whether you have structured and planned a good set of questionnaires. This is the drawback with students that are shy, students that are not interested in learning or older students that are not used to interactive learning.

Rowe 1986; Black and Harrison 2001; Black et al. 2002 had identified some strategies to attract students attention and to get them to respond. To provide an environment where students feels safe in making mistakes and not be judged or ridicule. Good prompts given by the teachers to build confidence for the students to at least try to answer. A ‘no – hands’ approach on answering questions, where teachers chooses the respondent. And lastly, wait time of 3 seconds.  Rowe 1986; Borich 1996, their research shows that the average wait time is 1 second.

“Lower-level questions usually demand factual, descriptive answers that are relatively easy to give. Higher-level questions require more sophisticated thinking from pupils; they are more complex and more difficult to answer. Higher-level questions are central to pupils’ cognitive development, and research evidence suggests that pupils’ levels of achievement can be increased by regular access to higher-order thinking”

The above are research done by Borich 1996; Muijs and Reynolds 2001; Morgan and Saxton 1994; Wragg and Brown 2001; Black and Harrison 2001.

It is useful to use Blooms Taxonomy (Bloom and Krathwohl 1956) when creating and structuring high level questions. It classifies on levels of intellectual behaviour that is important during learning into six levels of complexity and abstraction. Those are:

1. Knowledge – to describe, recall
2. Comprehension – to translate, review, report
3. Application – to interpret, predict
4. Analysis – to explain, analyse, criticise
5. Synthesis – to design, create, construct
6. Evaluation – assess, compare, argue, select.

From the scale of order, knowledge is the lowest and evaluation is the highest.

Therefore it can be concluded that, researches has suggested that good teachers uses a great number of open questions. With, of course, mix of both open and close end questions depending on the lessons objectives. Teachers that doesn’t provide open end questions may provide inadequate cognitive challenges for their students. Because of its main importance in teaching and learning, questioning is by far the most researched area and the most successful.

Referring to Blooms Taxonomy, the questions that are prepared according to the text ‘The Arrogant Swans’ are as follows.

1. Knowledge – for students to retain information for specific task or other related informations

§  What is the story about?

§  Who paid golden feathers to the King?

2. Comprehension – for students to process the knowledge that they already had to answer the questions

§  What do you think happens to the swans when the bird went to see the King?

§  What did the bird plead to the swans?

3. Application – students to apply their existing knowledge to apply to a new context.

§  What do you think happen to the swans after the King gave his orders?

4. Inference – to link students to a more abstract, conceptual thoughts

§  What moral qualities does the story teaches you?

§  Why do you think the swans doesn’t allow the bird to stay in the river?

5. Synthesis – for students to collect from available knowledge and respond to new knowledge

§  What would you do if you were in the bird’s situation?

6. Evaluation – students to use their knowledge to form their own judgement and to stand by them

§  Is the King’s action towards the swans appropriate? What do you think?

§  What conclusion could you draw from this story?

Summary

Why repertoire questioning? Repertoire questionings will assist students to expand the way they think that are usually based on contractual and factual thinking, to ways of thinking analytically and to evaluate. Repertoire questionings also helps to establish key understanding, students must be lead through a planned sequences of questioning. This method also allows students to problem solving, formulation of hypotheses and also to promote reasoning and the way they have learned. Researchers has proven that questioning technics helps develop critical thinking and cognitive ability for the students. The way teachers imply them is important. Teachers must learn on how to attract students in the lesson and in way of questioning. It is crucial for the students to feel that the questions put to them are not as if they are being interrogated. As said before, questioning is something that both teachers an students can both learn and benefit from it.

“we learn 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we hear and see, 70% of what we discuss with others, 80% of what we experience ourselves and 95% of what we teach”

(William Glasser)

REFERENCES

v  Morgan, N. and Saxton, J. (1994) Asking better questions: models, techniques and classroom activities for engaging students in learning. Pembroke. ISBN: 1551380455.

v  Rowe, M. B. (1986) ‘Wait time: slowing down may be a way of speeding up!’. Journal of Teacher Education 37 (January–February) 43–50.

v  Black, P. and Harrison, C. (2001) ‘Feedback in questioning and marking: the science teacher’s role in formative assessment’. School Science Review 82 (June) 43–49.

v  Pedagogy and Practice: Teaching and Learning in Secondary Schools (2004). Viewed at http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/5671/2/cea27fdd968639560cb245efafd9c2ff.pdf. Accessed on 12^th March 2014