Questions

Regardless of the level, students always seem to have trouble with asking questions. Answering them is easy enough, but asking them kind of puts the student on the spot. In order to get rid of that uncomfortable feeling of trying to figure out what to ask and how to ask it, we spent a great deal of time practicing questions in the last lesson.

One of the students - a salaryman - has absolutely no problems answering questions but has a lot of difficulty asking them. One problem is that he has picked up a lot of slang from watching English movies and doesn't know what material is appropriate for usage and what should be left on the big screen. The other student is a bit lower in level and is completely unaccustomed to asking questions. So we would be going through the lesson slowly in order to build a solid foundation for asking questions.

We first started off with some simple questions like, "How are you?" and, "What is your favorite...?" The latter was especially useful since both students weren't familiar with the word 'favorite'. From there, we started to build onto the questions and change the tenses as the students became more comfortable. We eventually ended up with interesting questions like, "Where do you want to go for your next vacation?" and "Why are you studying English." By the end of the lesson, the students were both extremely happy to have some fun questions to ask in their next class at Smith's.