Classroom Observation: Report 7

Teacher Observed: S
Observer: Alejandra de Antoni
Date: October 26th 2009
Class: 4th Year.
School: P (Buenos Aires City)
Number of Learners: 10
Age: 16/17 years old
Length of Lesson: 40 minutes
Level: Intermediate
Observer: Alejandra de Antoni
Teacher Observed: S

The Language of Questions

Observation Task taken from “Classroom Observation Tasks” (Cambridge)

Introduction:
This is the final report of my classroom observations for Methods II (a subject on TEFL
to teenagers and adults).
I must admit that this course in particular was a very nice one to observe since all the
students seemed really interested in the lesson’s topic “The Secret Gardener,” which is
a book they had been reading at home.
It was a speaking lesson because they spent the whole period talking about and
discussing the book. The most remarkable thing was that it seemed that all the
students had read the book at home and, therefore, they were prepared to discuss it. I
am placing great emphasis on this fact because it is not always the case that all
students read the books they are assigned. It is something remarkable both from the
part of the students and the teacher. It is great to see that students have done such a
time-consuming task at home (reading nowadays is not anymore teenagers’ cup of tea)
and it is also great that the teacher succeeded in making her students read! 
As regards the report itself, I will analyse the language of questions following a very
interesting classroom observation task1 taken from the book “Classroom Observation
Tasks” by Ruth Wajnryb. To do so, I have collected 20 questions asked by the teacher
during the lesson as well as 5 teacher question-student answer sets. After presenting
you with the data collected, I will analyse it following the “After the Lesson” and
“Reflection” sections provided by the task.

Data Collected

Questions asked by the teacher during the lesson.

1. What is the subject of this sentence?

2. What’s the meaning of “broke into”?
3. What’s the tense here?
4. Is it Simple Past?
5. Any volunteer to start retelling “The Secret Garden”?
6. What was strange?
7. Could you continue with the story?
8. Who was Ben?
9. What was the first contact?
10. What happened to Ben when he first saw her?
11. Do you remember the description you read there in the book?
12. What was her physical appearance?
13. What was Ben’s attitude when he knew who the girl was?
14. What happened when Mary told him that she was Mr Grey’s niece?
15. Did he change his attitude?
16. Did he like her?
17. What about her uncle?
18. What was Mary interested in?
19. What do we know about Martha’s family?
20. What was special about Deacon?

Teacher Question-Student Answer Sets. A set here means an exchange between

teacher and student, initiated by the teacher’s question.

1st Set

T: He spent all day in his bedroom. Why?

S: He had something on his back.
T: So he didn’t want to show himself.

2nd Set

1
See the Appendix to have a complete view of the Observation Task I followed in this
report.

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Observation Reports 2009
 Classroom Observation: Report 7
Teacher Observed: S
Observer: Alejandra de Antoni
Date: October 26th 2009
T: She spent a lot of time with Collins, they became friends and he started behaving
different, how?
S: He stopped being angry all the time.

3rd Set

T: What was the reason? Why?

S: Because of a terrible disease.

4th Set

T: You said that she was born in India… Why was she born in India?
S: Because at that moment Britain controlled India.

5th Set

T: Why was that morning strange?

S: Because she felt something wrong was happening.

Analysing the Data collected

Firstly, I will classify the questions asked by the teacher into the categories provided by
the task:

1. What is the subject of this sentence? DISPLAY QUESTION

2. What’s the meaning of “broke into”? SHORT ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-
STYLE QUESTION
3. What’s the tense here? DISPLAY QUESTION
4. Is it Simple Past? YES/NO QUESTION – DISPLAY QUESTION
5. Any volunteer to start retelling “The Secret Garden”? YES/NO
QUESTION
6. What was strange? SHORT ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-STYLE QUESTION
7. Could you continue with the story? YES/NO QUESTION
8. Who was Ben? SHORT ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-STYLE QUESTION
9. What was the first contact? SHORT ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-STYLE
QUESTION
10. What happened to Ben when he first saw her? SHORT
ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-STYLE QUESTION
11. Do you remember the description you read there in the book? YES/NO
QUESTION
12. What was her physical appearance? SHORT ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-
STYLE QUESTION
13. What was Ben’s attitude when he knew who the girl was? SHORT
ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-STYLE QUESTION
14. What happened when Mary told him that she was Mr Grey’s niece?
SHORT ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-STYLE QUESTION
15. Did he change his attitude? YES/NO QUESTION
16. Did he like her? YES/NO QUESTION
17. What about her uncle? SHORT ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-STYLE
QUESTION
18. What was Mary interested in? SHORT ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-STYLE
QUESTION

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Observation Reports 2009
 Classroom Observation: Report 7
Teacher Observed: S
Observer: Alejandra de Antoni
Date: October 26th 2009
19. What do we know about Martha’s family? SHORT ANSWER/RETRIEVAL-
STYLE QUESTION
20. What was special about Deacon? NON-RETRIEVAL QUESTION. In this
case, even though students need to recall what they have read, I do not take
it as a Retrieval question because I believe that the students are asked to give
their opinion so as to explain what was special about Deacon.

Secondly, after classifying the questions, it can be said that there is a pattern quite
easily recognisable: most of the questions call for a “short retrieval answer” (which
means that students are asked to give information they have already worked on, i.e.
they are asked to give information taken from the book they have read).
It is important to point out that, even though most of the questions were not
challenging and did not ask for the students’ opinion or reflection, it was certainly
because of the type of lesson they had that the teacher opted for these questions. It
was a lesson in which they were talking about the book they had to read and, most
probably, the teacher was asking these questions so as to check whether they had
actually read it or not. As I said before, it is sometimes really difficult to make students
read something and, consequently, the teacher may have decided to ask these
questions so as to make sure that the students needed to have read the story in order
to be able to answer them. I would even say that, after completing this “checking”
stage, the teacher may start a second stage in which students will be asked to give
their opinion on the story. However, since I only observed thirty minutes of a work that
takes more than just a 40-minute lesson, I am certain that this is by no means a clear
picture either of the students or the teacher.

Thirdly, I am going to classify some of the questions according to their difficulty from
the learner’s point of view. I am going to rank them from the easies to the most
difficult.

EASY

1. What is the subject of this sentence?

2. Is it Simple Past?
3. Who was Ben?
4. What was the first contact?
5. What about her uncle?
6. What was Mary interested in?
7. What do we know about Martha’s family?
8. What was special about Deacon?

DIFFICULT

Following my own criteria for this classification, I would say that the factor that
increases difficulty is related to the amount of information and the kind of answer that
we are asking our students to give. In the first one, students were simply asked to take
a look at the sentence written on the board and to say what its subject was. They only
had to look at the board. They were not asked to think or analyse anything and the
answer was 100% restricted. There was only one subject in the sentence; therefore,
there was only one possible answer. In the second question, I thought it was a bit more
difficult because the student was asked this question not because the teacher wanted
him to say whether it was simply past or not but because she wanted to help the
student realise that, because of the time reference she used, the appropriate tense
was Present Perfect. Since answering the question implied a lot more than just saying
“yes or no” I decided to classify it as being more challenging than the first one.
Questions 3 to 7 are “short-answer/retrieval-style questions. I have classified them is
this particular order because I took into account the level of difficulty these questions
had from the learner’s point of view. For instance, question 3 was easier than the other
four because it only required students to say who Ben was and that could be said in
very few words (e.g.: he was Mary’s father). Each of the other four, in the order I put
them, asked for more and more information and the students may have found it
difficult to not only to construct their answers but also to justify them. In these four
questions, I think, students were not simply asked to retell the story but find a way of
isolating the required information and to justify or explain certain events resorting to
what they had read. As regards the last question, I thought it was the most difficult one
for the learner because he needed not only to have read the book but also to be able to
give his opinion on what he had read and to justify his answer.

Fourthly, I am going to rank the question-and-answer sets I have recorded. They will be
ranked according to the level of complexity of response so that (1) will the response
requiring the least challenge to the student and (5) will be the response requiring the
greatest challenge.

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Observation Reports 2009
 Classroom Observation: Report 7
Teacher Observed: S
Observer: Alejandra de Antoni
Date: October 26th 2009

1
T: She spent a lot of time with Collins, they became friends and he started behaving
different, how?
S: He stopped being angry all the time.

2
T: What was the reason? Why?
S: Because of a terrible disease.

3
T: He spent all day in his bedroom. Why?
S: He had something on his back.
T: So he didn’t want to show himself.

4
T: You said that she was born in India… Why was she born in India?
S: Because at that moment Britain controlled India.

5
T: Why was that morning strange?
S: Because she felt something wrong was happening.

As you can see, there is a connection between the type of question and the complexity
of its answer. I think that the more the question deviates from asking the student to
recall information, the more challenging the question is. For instance, if the student is
just asked to retell what he has read, the question is not going to be too demanding for
the only thing the student has to do is to remember what he read. However, when the
students are asked to explain why something has happened, i.e. to give their opinion
on the events, finding appropriate answers becomes more difficult. For example, if we
take the fourth set, we can clearly see that the student has gone through some kind of
reasoning in her mind before answering the question. In order for the student to give
such an answer, she certainly has to make a connection between the woman that was
born in India, her parents’ nationality, her parents’ job (in this case her father’s
because he was a British officer working in India) and the fact that, even though her
parents were born in Britain, they were living in India because of her father’s job. The
student has certainly analysed the events with which she was presented in the story so
as to answer the question. Finally, as regards the fifth set, I would say that this is the
most challenging one because the question was open to the student’s interpretation of
the story. Saying that something is strange is completely subjective and, consequently,
the student’s account on such judgement will certainly oblige him to think about what
has happened in the story that morning and to make the necessary connections
between the events and the idea of them being “strange.”

Finally, I would like to comment on the following remark:

“The challenge to students’ internal representation of knowledge that a particular

question may present.” I love this idea! It is important to keep in mind that every time
we ask our students a question we are asking them to do some cognitive exercise. We
need to consider the challenge (or the lack of it) whenever we ask a question. It is
better, I believe, to provide students with cognitively challenging questions and not to
wait, maybe, for an accurate response. It may be difficult, of course, to sacrifice getting
correct answers all the time but it may be a necessary sacrifice if that means that we
are guiding our students to a more interesting, demanding and, above all, useful
approach to questions. However, it is also essential not to give our students too difficult
questions because it will certainly be discouraging and counterproductive. Asking them
questions we know they are not ready to answer is as useless as asking them easy and
non-challenging ones. What we must do is to go for challenging and appropriate
questions so as to show our students that we care not only about how well they speak
English but also about what they have to say.

Reflection

The very first thing I realised when I was collecting the data was that we (teachers) ask
A LOT of questions! What is even more interesting is the wide variety of reasons for us

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Observation Reports 2009
 Classroom Observation: Report 7
Teacher Observed: S
Observer: Alejandra de Antoni
Date: October 26th 2009
to do so. We may be checking comprehension, calling our students’ attention, asking
for information, asking for opinion, forcing students to participate, etc. Since questions
are such a central constituent of our lessons, it is important for us to try to look for the
best way of using them. Having done this report has helped me a lot to understand the
importance and influence that our questions have upon our students. It is true that, as
teachers, we have in mind loads of things while we teach but it is encouraging to know
that with such an easy-to-do change in our teaching we may make a substantial
difference in our students’ learning experience. Questions need to be asked not only to
check whether our students have studied or not but to give them a possibility to share
with us and their partners what they have to say. In the English classroom, if we are to
foster a communicative classroom, we have to ask the same kind of questions we
would ask them in real life. Instead of asking my students to give me the translation of
a word or the past form of a verb I could ask them to describe the word or to tell me
what they did yesterday. When we do not remember a word in our own language, when
we are speaking, we do not go to take a dictionary or ask a teacher for its meaning, we
simply try to paraphrase ourselves or to explain the meaning of the word so that the
addressee can understand what we are saying. And that is what I want to foster in my
classroom. If I ask a question it has to be because I actually want to know its answer
and not because of how it is phrased.
Let me say, however, that there are exceptions to this. We are teaching a language
after all and there must be moments in which we focus on its form. The complete lack
of language-focus questions is as bad as having a whole lesson based on them.

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Observation Reports 2009
 Classroom Observation: Report 7
Teacher Observed: S
Observer: Alejandra de Antoni
Date: October 26th 2009

APPENDIX (Observation Task 2.2 – Classroom Observation Tasks – Cambridge)

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Observation Reports 2009
 Classroom Observation: Report 7
Teacher Observed: S
Observer: Alejandra de Antoni
Date: October 26th 2009

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Observation Reports 2009