Learning to Make Better Questions in Grade 2 (Part 1)

By DuMont Television/Rosen Studios, New York-photographer.

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16489974

For the past two weeks in grade 2, EAL teachers have supported homeroom teachers and grade 2 students in creating better questions to guide our inquiries into making healthy choices.

All kids ask questions...why do we need to teach this skill?

As adults, we sometimes assume that children naturally have a tendency to ask questions, but as teachers, we know that this tendency can be enhanced and strengthened through explicit instruction.

Additionally, from a language acquisition perspective, teachers know that composing questions is often not so simple for younger students, all of whom are acquiring cognitive academic language, the language required to discuss deep thinking and perform many tasks involved in learning and education.

What do students need to learn about asking questions?

EAL and language acquisition teachers approach teaching students about question with multiple learning intentions in mind. For example, students need to understand meaning behind the question function words: what, who, when, why, where, how, which, etc.

We also want students to be proficient in forming questions (otherwise known as using proper syntax) so that they can clearly articulate what they want to know. Anyone who has worked with children who are acquiring language has seen how students often begin making logical questions, but become confused by the question's finish. This involves understanding when to use helping verbs such as is, are, do, does, etc.

It is also crucial that students can anticipate the type of information that will be generated by different types of questions. For instance, they need to be familiar with the fact that questions beginning with Are, Is, Can, Do, or Does will result in an answer of Yes or No. Similarly, they need to know that some questions involving wh- question words will result in more or less information than others. Finally, we also want students to begin to understand that combining these question words with certain modal verbs will require more creative research and perhaps lead to richer and more powerful answers.

By focusing on these learning intentions, we aimed to explicitly teach students about how to use English for the academic language function of inquiry.

How did we teach students to create and ask thick relevant questions?

We first wanted to frame instruction in big picture terms. We reminded students that learners should be inquirers and asked them what they thought we had to do live up to this learner profile attribute? In all classes someone volunteered that inquirers ask questions. Together we then came up with lists of words that we thought signalled questions.

We then played a little game as a provocation that I call "How do you get to know your teacher?" In pairs, students were given two answers that I might supply in an interview, some of them health related in order to give students early exposure to they types of questions they needed to ask during this unit. Students had to formulate a question that would produce each answer. In this exercise, I purposely included some answers that could result from a variety of questions; "No, I am not" for example caused students to come up with "Are you a girl?" A few student pairs then shared their questions with the class while students who had been given the same answered checked to see if they had conceived similar questions.

We then discussed the importance of making questions for this unit, as students were going to have to inquire as individuals to find out some information of interest to present orally and on a poster.

Question Creating Chart

We then supplied students with what I called a "handy dandy question creator" that could help students frame their questions and we described the process of how to use it. In making a question, students could select a question word, find a word that could come after the question word in a column further right, and then add the topic of their question followed by a question mark, finally writing the full question in the appropriate row/column based on their selections. Students then returned to seats to try their hand at using the question creating chart. We took a break after about ten minutes to give students a chance to share and learn from the types of questions created by their peers.

In part two of this blog post, I will describe how after an initial round of question creating students learned to distinguish the questions that would give them the most information from their question charts.