Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
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teaching-english-as-a-foreign-language-routledge-education-books
Type of question
Type of minimal response (a) General Yes/No (b) Wh—? One word/short phrase (c) Alternative,‘or’ One word/short phrase/ clause/sentence (d) Why?/What does… Clause/sentence/paragraph mean?/How does… work? (e) Declarative statement True/False (f) Multiple-choice questions Non-linguistic (tick, cross, underlining, etc.) The cross-multiplication of these two dimensions gives some 48 different types of questions which can be used to help pupils to read with greater understanding. Reading 105 or explicit, and the structure of the reply may bear very little relation to either. Clearly questions of this kind may make very heavy demands on the ability to produce complex structural patterns, and so must present certain sorts of inherent difficulty which must be taken into account. There are two other kinds of question which are frequently used to try to help pupils understand texts better. One of these is the True/False variety. Here the structural complexity of the reply is of the same order as for Yes/No questions, but whereas certain sorts of Yes/No questions predispose us to one answer or the other by virtue of their intonation, and hence can be answered in a virtually mechanical, automatic way, True/False questions demand judgments at the level of content so may be just that little bit more difficult. (The weapons the men were given were suitable for attacking tanks. True or False?) The second kind of question here is the multiple-choice question—frequently abbreviated to MCQ. In a sense this is simply an elaboration of the True/False type since such questions involve making decisions about the relative truth of a number of statements related to the text. In terms of the structural dimension considered above it should be understood that the structural patterns of the questions can be made to match exactly the structural patterns of the text. This means that MCQs have great advantages where the linguistic levels at which pupils are working are at least partly defined in structural terms. The mode of the answer is virtually non- linguistic, it may be a tick in a box or a circle round a letter, or at most a letter or number written down, so the demands made on the pupil in terms of the production of complex structure patterns is nil. This means that all his attention may be devoted to the business of understanding the black marks on the paper. It is very important to remember the distinction between questions for teaching and questions for testing with the multiple choice format. The most important characteristic of teaching-MCQs is that the rubric for them no longer reads ‘Choose the correct answer’ but ‘Choose the best answer’. Testing-MCQs have one element which is clearly and unambiguously ‘correct’. With teachingMCQs several of the elements may be equally acceptable at one level, and it may require considerable discussion and close examination of both Reading 106 the text and the question to decide which one is the ‘best’. It must be very clearly understood that the purpose of framing these questions is not to find out how much of the particular text in question the reader has understood but to help him to develop strategies by means of which he may better be able to understand other texts. Detailed discussion and exemplification of what is involved is to be found in Read and Think by John Munby. It will be noticed that while open-ended questions for teaching are very often oral, leading and guiding the pupil along the road to fuller and fuller understanding, MCQs for teaching are most likely to be written in form. The pattern of classroom interaction for open-ended questions is likely to be teacher centred: the teacher asks the questions, the pupils answer. With MCQs the most profitable pattern of classroom interaction is between pupils in small groups where the discussion of alternatives can go ahead and the close reading of text and question, comparison and interpretation develop freely. The very great success of this technique, illustrated by the second lesson in Chapter 2, is one of the things that recommends it so strongly. The discussion of using questions to help pupils understand texts better so far, assumes that the questions are formulated by the teacher or the textbook writer, but questions formulated by the pupils themselves can contribute substantially to furthering their understanding of texts. This technique has the advantage that the questions that the pupils ask will in the first instance be real questions, directed at gaining information which is not accessible to them on first reading the text. If the teacher begins by asking each pupil to formulate three questions about the text, questions to which he genuinely does not know the answer, and small group discussion is initiated, some of these questions can be answered by other pupils in the group. If the discussion is then widened to a whole class discussion even more of the questions are likely to be answered and the few remaining ones can be dealt with by the teacher in the ordinary way. With very little guidance pupils soon develop strategies for getting the meat out of a text, and soon acquire the ability to peel layers of meaning off. This seems to be a particularly useful technique for dealing with literary texts like poems, where the Reading 107 layers of meaning may be very numerous. It may of course be necessary for the teacher, keeping the checklist of types of understanding in mind (see p. 104), to use straight questioning techniques to lead his pupils towards full understanding, but pupil-initiated questions have the advantage that they lead the pupil to develop those strategies for understanding which will ultimately take him beyond the tutelage of the teacher, and this must surely be a fundamental educational objective. See Appendix 2 for a summary of questioning techniques. A recurring problem in helping pupils to understand what they read is that no matter how carefully the teacher chooses his texts, there will always be some pupils for whom they are too easy and some for whom the texts are too difficult. One way round this problem is to attempt to individualise instruction. This involves having available a large number of carefully graded texts with appropriate exercises on them which pupils can work through largely on their own. Creating materials of this kind is a long-term project which would require great dedication on the part of the teacher to carry through successfully. However there do exist published materials of this kind. They are known as the SRA Reading Laboratories (Science Research Associates, 1958/60). These materials need to be used with caution since their cultural orientation is largely American and biased towards the native English speaker, but they nevertheless are a valuable source of immediately usable material. Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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