Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Type of question
Type of minimal response
(a) General
Yes/No
(b) Wh—?
One word/short phrase
(c) Alternative,‘or’
One word/short phrase/
clause/sentence
(d) Why?/What does…
Clause/sentence/paragraph
mean?/How does…
work?
(e) Declarative statement
True/False
(f) Multiple-choice questions
Non-linguistic (tick, cross,
underlining, etc.)
The cross-multiplication of these two dimensions gives some 48
different types of questions which can be used to help pupils to read
with greater understanding.

---

Reading
105
or explicit, and the structure of the reply may bear very little
relation to either. Clearly questions of this kind may make
very heavy demands on the ability to produce complex
structural patterns, and so must present certain sorts of
inherent difficulty which must be taken into account.
There are two other kinds of question which are
frequently used to try to help pupils understand texts better.
One of these is the True/False variety. Here the structural
complexity of the reply is of the same order as for Yes/No
questions, but whereas certain sorts of Yes/No questions
predispose us to one answer or the other by virtue of their
intonation, and hence can be answered in a virtually
mechanical, automatic way, True/False questions demand
judgments at the level of content so may be just that little bit
more difficult. (The weapons the men were given were
suitable for attacking tanks. True or False?)
The second kind of question here is the multiple-choice
question—frequently abbreviated to MCQ. In a sense this is
simply an elaboration of the True/False type since such
questions involve making decisions about the relative truth of
a number of statements related to the text. In terms of the
structural dimension considered above it should be
understood that the structural patterns of the questions can be
made to match exactly the structural patterns of the text. This
means that MCQs have great advantages where the linguistic
levels at which pupils are working are at least partly defined in
structural terms. The mode of the answer is virtually non-
linguistic, it may be a tick in a box or a circle round a letter, or
at most a letter or number written down, so the demands made
on the pupil in terms of the production of complex structure
patterns is nil. This means that all his attention may be
devoted to the business of understanding the black marks on
the paper. It is very important to remember the distinction
between questions for teaching and questions for testing with
the multiple choice format. The most important characteristic
of teaching-MCQs is that the rubric for them no longer reads
‘Choose the correct answer’ but ‘Choose the best answer’.
Testing-MCQs have one element which is clearly and
unambiguously ‘correct’. With teachingMCQs several of the
elements may be equally acceptable at one level, and it may
require considerable discussion and close examination of both

---

Reading
106
the text and the question to decide which one is the ‘best’. It
must be very clearly understood that the purpose of framing
these questions is not to find out how much of the particular
text in question the reader has understood but to help him to
develop strategies by means of which he may better be able to
understand other texts. Detailed discussion and
exemplification of what is involved is to be found in Read and
Think by John Munby.
It will be noticed that while open-ended questions for
teaching are very often oral, leading and guiding the pupil
along the road to fuller and fuller understanding, MCQs for
teaching are most likely to be written in form. The pattern of
classroom interaction for open-ended questions is likely to be
teacher centred: the teacher asks the questions, the pupils
answer. With MCQs the most profitable pattern of
classroom interaction is between pupils in small groups
where the discussion of alternatives can go ahead and the
close reading of text and question, comparison and
interpretation develop freely. The very great success of this
technique, illustrated by the second lesson in Chapter 2, is
one of the things that recommends it so strongly.
The discussion of using questions to help pupils understand
texts better so far, assumes that the questions are formulated
by the teacher or the textbook writer, but questions
formulated by the pupils themselves can contribute
substantially to furthering their understanding of texts. This
technique has the advantage that the questions that the pupils
ask will in the first instance be real questions, directed at
gaining information which is not accessible to them on first
reading the text. If the teacher begins by asking each pupil to
formulate three questions about the text, questions to which
he genuinely does not know the answer, and small group
discussion is initiated, some of these questions can be
answered by other pupils in the group. If the discussion is then
widened to a whole class discussion even more of the
questions are likely to be answered and the few remaining
ones can be dealt with by the teacher in the ordinary way. With
very little guidance pupils soon develop strategies for getting
the meat out of a text, and soon acquire the ability to peel
layers of meaning off. This seems to be a particularly useful
technique for dealing with literary texts like poems, where the

---

Reading
107
layers of meaning may be very numerous. It may of course be
necessary for the teacher, keeping the checklist of types of
understanding in mind (see p. 104), to use straight questioning
techniques to lead his pupils towards full understanding, but
pupil-initiated questions have the advantage that they lead the
pupil to develop those strategies for understanding which will
ultimately take him beyond the tutelage of the teacher, and this
must surely be a fundamental educational objective. See
Appendix 2 for a summary of questioning techniques.
A recurring problem in helping pupils to understand what
they read is that no matter how carefully the teacher chooses
his texts, there will always be some pupils for whom they are
too easy and some for whom the texts are too difficult. One
way round this problem is to attempt to individualise
instruction. This involves having available a large number of
carefully graded texts with appropriate exercises on them
which pupils can work through largely on their own.
Creating materials of this kind is a long-term project which
would require great dedication on the part of the teacher to
carry through successfully. However there do exist published
materials of this kind. They are known as the SRA Reading
Laboratories (Science Research Associates, 1958/60). These
materials need to be used with caution since their cultural
orientation is largely American and biased towards the
native English speaker, but they nevertheless are a valuable
source of immediately usable material.