About this activity
Twelve statements, each with a question type to produce: the girl is eating, ask a what question; the boy is at the park, ask a where question; he is crying because he fell, ask a why question; she rode the bus, ask a how question. Asking questions is a harder skill than answering them and is almost never taught directly.
How to use it in a session
Insist on a well-formed question rather than a question word. What she eating is a question and not a well-formed one, and the auxiliary inversion — what is she eating — is what the task is for. Do the what and where items first, which take a simple inversion, and leave why and how until later, since those often need a fuller sentence. Eight minutes covers the twelve.
What to listen for
Listen for the inversion. Where the boy is has the question word and the statement word order, which is the characteristic error and is different from not knowing the question word. Watch the why items, where the statement already contains the answer — a student who asks why is he crying has ignored the because clause, which is exactly right.
Carrying it home
Swapping roles is the practice. Asking a child to ask you three questions about your day, rather than answering three about theirs, reverses the usual direction and is where question formation actually gets exercised.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- Kindergarten through third, and older students learning English as an additional language.
- Do I need an account?
- No, all twelve items play free.
- Why practise asking rather than answering?
- Because asking is harder and less often taught. A question requires the student to identify what they do not know and to invert the sentence, neither of which answering demands.