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INTRODUCTION
1.3 PURPOSE
In order to share knowledge about Type Of Question for the readers.
CONTENT
All educators, no matter what level, need to be able to craft and create at
least 5 basic types of questions. The art of asking questions is an ancient part
of good teaching and one of the rudimentary skills all teachers should be able
to master. Socrates believed that knowledge and awareness were an intrinsic
part of each learner. Thus, in exercising the craft of good pedagogy a skilled
educator must reach into learners’ hidden levels of knowing and awareness in
order to help them reach new levels of thinking through thoughtfully
developed questions.
Examples:
a. How are the deaths of Ophelia and Juliet the same and yet different?
(Compare and contrast.)
c. Why and how might the concept of Piagetian schema be related to the
concepts presented in Jungian personality theory, and why might this be
important to consider in teaching and learning?
5. Combinations – These are questions that blend any combination of the above.
You can easily monitor what types of questions you are asking your students
through simple tallies and examining degrees of difficulty. Or, if your students are
older, then ask them to monitor the types of questions you ask, allowing them to
identify the types. For those of you who might be a bit more collaborative or
adventurous in your teaching and want to give students some ownership in their
educational processes, challenge them to create course related questions to ask
one another. In my many years of teaching I was always pleasantly surprised at
what students came up with.
Lynn Erickson was a principal and has written a number of books on different
educational topics. In the one cited below she also tackles types of questions as a
topic but she divides them into factual, conceptual and provocative.
Her provocative ones are ones that entice, and ones that cannot be answered
easily. They are questions that can be used to motivate and frame content or ones
that could be classified as essential questions. In the initial categorization above
they would be either complex divergent questions or more sophisticated
combination questions like divergent/evaluative ones.
A. Yes / No questions
Most of them start with an auxiliary verb and expect an answer Yes or No.
Have you ever been here before? Yes / No (Yes I have / No I haven’t)
Did you visit your aunt yesterday? Yes / No (Yes I did / No I didn't)
Note: you can ask a yes / no question using the verb "to be" as a full verb (not an
auxiliary) as well.
B. Wh-Questions
As you can understand from its name, most of them start with a question word
such as:
What / Where / Why / Who / Whose / When / Which
Wh-questions Answers
What is your name? My name is Allen.
Note: there are other question words that don’t start with "wh" as well.
How / how many / how often / how far / how much / how long / how old etc.
Examples:
D. Choice Questions
Choice questions are questions that offer a choice of several options as an answer.
They are made up of two parts, which are connected by the conjunction or.
For example:
Does she like ice cream or sweets? – She likes ice cream.
Where would you go, to the cinema or to the theatre? – I would go to
the cinema.
Is he a teacher or a student? – He is a student.
However, when the question concerns the subject, the auxiliary verb comes before
the second option. The answer is short:
E. Hypothetical Questions
Examples
What would you do if you won the lottery?
Examples:
She asked me if she could borrow my dictionary.
She asked me where the nearest train station was.
(not where was the nearest train station…)
G. Leading questions
Examples:
A simple recall question could be, ‘What is your mother’s maiden name?’. This
requires the respondent to recall some information from memory, a fact. A school
teacher may ask recall questions of their pupils, ‘What is the highest
mountain?’ Process questions require more thought and analysis and/or a sharing
of opinion. Examples include, ‘What skills can you bring to this organisation
that the other applicants cannot?’ or ‘What are the advantages and disadvantages
of asking leading questions to children?’
I. Rhetorical Questions
‘If you set out to fail and then succeed have you failed or succeeded?’ Rhetorical
questions are often used by speakers in presentations to get the audience to think –
rhetorical questions are, by design, used to promote thought.
Politicians, lecturers, priests and others may use rhetorical questions when
addressing large audiences to help keep attention. ‘Who would not hope to stay
healthy into old age?’, is not a question that requires an answer, but our brains are
programmed to think about it thus keeping us more engaged with the speaker.
J. Funnelling
The questions in this example become more restrictive, starting with open
questions which allow for very broad answers, at each step the questions become
more focused and the answers become more restrictive.
Funnelling can work the other way around, starting with closed questions and
working up to more open questions. For a counsellor or interrogator these
funnelling techniques can be a very useful tactic to find out the maximum amount
of information, by beginning with open questions and then working towards more
closed questions. In contrast, when meeting somebody new it is common to start
by asking more closed questions and progressing to open questions as both parties
relax. (See our page: What is Counselling? for more on the role of the
counsellor.)
K. Responses
As there are a myriad of questions and question types so there must also be a
myriad of possible responses. Theorists have tried to define the types of
responses that people may have to questions, the main and most important ones
are:
A direct and honest response – this is what the questioner would usually want
to achieve from asking their question.
A lie – the respondent may lie in response to a question. The questioner may be
able to pick up on a lie based on plausibility of the answer but also on the non-
3.2 Advice
We must know our purpose about the question that we are going to ask.
And about the grammar, at least we have to know about 16 tenses before knowing
about type of questions.
https://www.grammarbank.com/question-types.html
https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/question-types.html
https://preply.com/en/blog/2014/11/13/types-of-questions-in-english/
https://thesecondprinciple.com/teaching-essentials/five-basic-types-questions/