Teaching
Questions: When and How?
Abstract
Jun Kramer
Mandarin Teacher,
2525 Princeton
Pike,
Nowadays communication has become the focus of foreign language learning. The most natural mode of communication is interpersonal communication, aka “questions and answers”. Therefore, the ability to ask and respond to questions accurately in the target language is the most essential skill for foreign language learners.
As a Mandarin teacher in a public school district whose teachers are required not to focus on grammar, to teach target language by the target language, and to promote interpersonal communication from Day 1, it is a challenge to conduct authentic oral inquiry inside classroom. The challenges include:
1. How students identify declarative sentences and questions in Mandarin.
2. How students identify the different types of questions in Mandarin, such as yes-no questions, wh-questions or other questions (e.g. disjunctive questions).
3. How students comprehend the “question words” in a question, such as interrogative words or question particles.
4. In almost all the textbooks on the market, the interrogative words, the “A-not-A” pattern, and question particles are spread across different texts and units.
In this session, I would like demonstrate two different classroom practices with regard to teaching questions: the “textbook way” and the “cluster way”. The “textbook way” is to to teach the “A-not-A” pattern, question particles, and all interrogative words when they shows up in the textbook and to summarize them after all of them were taught individually. The “cluster way” is to teach the “A-not-A” pattern, question particles, and all interrogative words in a cluster first.
At the end of this session, I would like to present the assessment result of each practice. The assessment includes the percentage of students in one class who comprehend the questions, the percentage of oral communications in the target language, the accuracy of the oral communication, etc. I hope that my classroom practices can prompt a discussion about “when” and “how” to teach questions to adolescence and younger students.