An essential skill in communicating and keeping up a conversation is the ability to ask questions. Students sometimes get lots of chances to answer questions but here are some ideas for how you can get them to make some questions themselves!
FAQs challenge
Tell students that they are preparing information on a topic for a booklet or a website, e.g. tourist information for their town, information about their school system, information about customs or music in their country, etc.
- Students in groups or pairs brainstorm a list of six to eight frequently asked questions on the subject.
- The whole class pool their questions and discuss them.
- Students prepare the answers in the next lesson.
Quiz question challenge
A quiz game based on recent vocabulary and topics covered can form the basis of this game with a twist. It has been played successfully with beginners!
- Prepare some questions and answers based on what you have recently covered in class.
- Read aloud the answers.
- In teams students must guess what the question is! Allow conferring between team members.
- Award two points for getting the question exactly right and one point for providing a question which makes sense and gets the answer. For example, if your question was What's the name of the tense we studied in unit 2? with the answer past simple, award two points if they give the original question, and one point if they say What tense is 'went'?
Language Level