Question Formation Through Dialogic Pedagogy

by Ashani Gunawardana | 17 Aug 2021

This lesson provides an opportunity for the students to form grammatically correct questions. This lesson incorporates dialogic pedagogical approach (with the ample use of classroom talk).

Resource Type: Lesson Plan

Audience: Adult, Secondary

Audience Language Proficiency: Intermediate

Duration: 60 minutes

Materials And Technology:

Access to internet
Whiteboard
Google Classroom

Objective:

The lesson aims to enable the students to:

Form yes/ no questions out of a statement
Form WH questions out of a yes/ no question

Outcome:

At the end of the lesson the students will be able to:

Ask questions accurately

Language Skill:Grammar

Content Area:

English as a second language
Dialogic pedagogy

Procedure:

Prepare (5 minutes)
- Direct casual questions to students as a warm up activity
  - Are you ready?
  - What is the lesson today?
  - Where did we stop last week?
  - Why are you silent?
- After students make their responses, instruct students to pay attention to the questions the teacher asked
- Write down the elicited questions on the whiteboard and focus students’ attention towards those questions
Present (25 minutes, while providing an opportunity for learner autonomy through dialogic pedagogy)
- Display the elicited sentences on the whiteboard
- Assign students to make yes/ no questions of those sentences as groups
- After 10 minutes, instruct the steps of forming yes/ no questions by eliciting answers from the students
  - Identify the verb
  - If the verb is “BE”, position the verb before the subject in a yes/ no Question
  - If the verb is one word verb, the dummy auxiliary has to be elicited in order to position it before the subject
  - If the verb phrase has more than one word verb, take the first auxiliary and position it before the subject
- Introduce WH question words in order to form the WH questions
  - When, where, why, who, how etc.
- Instruct students to add WH question word prior to the yes/ no questions structure
Practice (15 minutes)
- Display 10 sentences on the board
- Ask students to form yes/no questions out of them
- Drill the yes /no questions 2-3 times
Perform (15 minutes)
- Instruct students to develop a TV interview (at least 10 questions using yes/ no and WH questions) with famous figure/s in the country (group work – 5-6 members) and enact it.
  - Group the students (5-6 members in a group)
  - Decide on a famous figure/s in the country that they select as the guest of their TV program
  - Based on the profile of the guest, ask students to write sentences which can be asked from the famous figure
    - If he is a movie star:
      - What is your latest movie?
      - With whom did you act in the movie….?
      - Which movie do you like most? Etc.
- Students practice and then enact it. Each role is to be videotaped.
  - Grant 10 marks for grammatically accurate 10 questions.
- At the end of each presentation, along with marks earned, students would be given written feedback on the errors made in the question formation and a soft copy of their role play to identify the errors

Assessment:

As formative assessment, instruct students to form at least 10 questions based on the poem The Snare by James Stephens (https://www.poemist.com/james-stephens/the-snare) and upload the answers to the google classroom.

Examples:

What do you hear?

References:

POEMIST: https://www.poemist.com/james-stephens/the-snare

TESOL Interest Section: Adult Education, Applied Linguistics