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Using effective questioning strategies with multilingual learners (Webinar)

Name: Using effective questioning strategies with multilingual learners (Webinar)
Uploaded: 2026-06-02T14:54:00+00:00
Duration: 59 min 2 s
Channel: The Bell Foundation
Description: Unterrichtsfragen dienen meist drei Zwecken: Vorwissen aktivieren, neu Gelerntes überprüfen sowie Denken, Reflexion und neue Ideen anregen. Effektives …

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Emily Curran: In the next couple of days, you'll receive an email with us with a link from the recording of this webinar and the links to the resources mentioned today. Emily Curran: So, welcome to today's webinar. Today's webinar is about using questioning strategies to support EAL learners across international primary and secondary stages.
Emily Curran: Our speaker, Tom Beakes, a trainer at the Bell Foundation, will explore how questioning can be used effectively with plurilingual learners who are learning English within the context of a mainstream curriculum. Emily Curran: So he'll look at how to check linguistic understanding, and how to use questioning to extend and develop learners' language skills in a curricular context.
Emily Curran: During the webinar, please feel free to use the chat option to send any questions as they come to you, and I'll collect them and pose them to Tom at the end. Emily Curran: So with that, I'll hand over to Tom to take us through today's topic. So over to you, Tom.
Tom Beakes: Thank you very much, Emily! And yeah, big welcome to everyone. As always, it's lovely to see people joining us from, all over the world, and, Tom Beakes: I think a lot of the things I'm going to talk about here are quite universal, but a lot of the ideas, things that I think have become quite…
Tom Beakes: common or popular in mainstream education here in the UK, and I'm sure some of you will have seen those things in your schools, but some of you may not, so there may be… hopefully there'll be something new for everybody here. Tom Beakes: Today.
Tom Beakes: And this is what we're gonna cover. Tom Beakes: So… Large part of today is looking at
Tom Beakes: what effective questioning looks like, and how we can adapt that for our god-earners of English. Tom Beakes: We're going to look at strategies for checking the understanding of prelingual learners, especially
Tom Beakes: In terms of unders… checking understanding of language. Tom Beakes: Language structures, as well as understanding concepts and
Tom Beakes: Ideas that we're teaching within the curriculum. Tom Beakes: We're going to explore, as well how learners can respond effectively to questioning, and how we can support them with that.
Tom Beakes: And that's hopefully so that you're better able, as an educator, to choose and adapt the questioning strategies that you use, so that all the learners in your lessons, regardless of English proficiency, are able to participate as much as possible in curricular learning. Tom Beakes: And yeah, to make sure that those learners are as involved, better able to contribute
Tom Beakes: Questioning in the classroom. Tom Beakes: And,
Tom Beakes: This might feel like quite a trivial or narrow topic in some respects to be doing a whole webinar about, but I would argue that it's really quite foundational to effective teaching and learning. Tom Beakes: And also for inclusion and belonging.
Tom Beakes: Because… As we know, inclusion and belonging isn't something that you can Tom Beakes: bestow on your learners. It's not something we do to our learners, right? It's… it can only come out of a sense of meaningful contribution to the group.
Tom Beakes: And so… Learners feeling like they're able to contribute, and that their contributions are valued, Tom Beakes: is really critical. Questioning is a huge role, plays a huge role in that, in building that inclusive classroom culture.
Tom Beakes: So… Tom Beakes: Today, we're going to be, as always, looking at this very generic classroom issue through the filter of multilingualism.
Tom Beakes: Supporting our English language. Tom Beakes: First thing we're going to look at, then, is some of these features of effective questioning.
Tom Beakes: First, for everybody here, it wouldn't be a webinar about questioning without a question for you. So… Tom Beakes: This is a little bit of an experiment, I've not tried this before in a webinar, but I'm gonna try and establish a questioning routine for this webinar.
Tom Beakes: What that means is I want… Tom Beakes: to answer a question in the chat, but I want everyone to reveal their responses at the same time, so we don't get distracted by that kind of drip, drip, drip of responses. So…
Tom Beakes: what I want you to do is, first of all, make sure the blue bar above the chat box is set to everyone. There should be a little blue box, with a little arrow, if you click the arrow. Tom Beakes: make sure it's set to everyone, so that everyone can see the response, not just hosts and panelists, otherwise only I… only me and Emily see it.
Tom Beakes: Then… Tom Beakes: When I reveal the question on the screen, write your response in the chat, but do not press enter until you see the magic wand. You'll see what I mean in a minute.
Tom Beakes: So… Tom Beakes: I'm gonna give you about 30 seconds thinking time for this question. You can write as many ideas in your response as you wish, maybe separate them with a comma or a number, but don't press enter until you see
Tom Beakes: Okay, here's the question. Tom Beakes: Why do we ask questions in the classroom?
Tom Beakes: write your ideas. Tom Beakes: Okay.
Tom Beakes: So, as we can see. Tom Beakes: lots of people already putting their ideas, but if you were following the instructions, I'm going to show you
Tom Beakes: the magic wand. Tom Beakes: And now… Everyone, you can put in your answers.
Tom Beakes: Okay, wow, fantastic. Tom Beakes: So many great responses there.
Tom Beakes: I think we can see quite a few themes, can't we? So there's checking understanding, activating. Tom Beakes: Checking comprehension… address misconceptions, yeah, okay. So, yeah, so there's, there's plenty of, shared themes.
Tom Beakes: For engagement, that's an interesting one we'll think about, talk about a bit later. Tom Beakes: Okay. So, thinking about this question, then,
Tom Beakes: I think you can categorize most of the questions teachers ask in the classroom into three areas. Tom Beakes: And the first of those is finding out what students already know, or maybe to remind them of something that they've previously learned, which people have mentioned.
Tom Beakes: Maybe activate that prior knowledge. Tom Beakes: One other thing that everybody's mentioned
Tom Beakes: for most people is checking understanding of something that's been newly learned. Obviously, that's kind of foundational to teaching and learning. Tom Beakes: I don't know the…
Tom Beakes: reason might be to make students produce new ideas. So, we see people writing things like getting people thinking, or, you know, generating engagement, and this is… yeah. Tom Beakes: Getting them to think of something, reflect, produce new ideas. Now, none of this is specific to multilingual learners, of course, it applies to everybody.
Tom Beakes: But it's really important to have that clarity on the purpose behind the questions we are asking, so that we can adapt and optimize these strategies, which is what we're going to look at for the rest of the webinar. Tom Beakes: So we can categorize questioning strategies relating,
Tom Beakes: To operating a multilingual context into four stages. Tom Beakes: And…
Tom Beakes: I'll just briefly give you an overview of those, and then we'll look at them in more detail. Tom Beakes: So, the first one is planning.
Tom Beakes: This might involve considering the types of questions we want to ask, how we're going to formulate the question, but also preparing or thinking about any scaffolds that might be needed. And we'll look at some of those a bit later. Tom Beakes: the next phase is the actual asking, so this is the practical and physical act of using the questions in the classroom, deciding who and to whom questions are posed, when they are asked, you know, even the physical positioning of the teacher, and their posture, and their use of body language, or
Tom Beakes: Positioning when asking questions can be important as well. Tom Beakes: The next stage is supporting pupil responses, and this refers to the techniques we can employ to ensure learners are able to articulate a response effectively. This might be with pre-prepared scaffolds, or it could be with on-the-spot techniques.
Tom Beakes: And lastly, the naming of this is a bit ambiguous, but responding, by that, I mean how a teacher follows up or builds on a student's response to ensure deeper learning, so… Tom Beakes: We're going to take each of these strategies in more detail, and look at some practical examples, and how they can be, tailored or adapted for use with multilingual learners.
Tom Beakes: So let's begin with our planning stage. And this speaks to the importance of designing questions to directly support your learning goals. So, again, speaks to the importance of having very clear both curricula, and language objectives, hopefully in your Tom Beakes: Lesson plans or schemes of work.
Tom Beakes: As people have mentioned, it's about establishing what learners already know, and considering which questions will help move forward learners' understanding of a topic. Tom Beakes: What are the questions that are going to help our language learners ensure they understand
Tom Beakes: Task, and the regular topic, and the meaning of the keywords, that will be Tom Beakes: Using in the lesson as well.
Tom Beakes: And I think planning questions you're going to ask is really important, especially Teachers who are less experienced. Tom Beakes: But, I think, you know, as we gain more experience, often we're able to do this almost subconsciously without thinking about it, some of these processes, but I think most teachers would
Tom Beakes: Plan at least some questions, in advance to structure that. Tom Beakes: Learning, and to make sure we're checking and understanding of the key elements of what we're teaching.
Tom Beakes: So, sequencing these questions then from building basic knowledge to expanding the thinking and language use Tom Beakes: This might look like starting off by reminding them what they recently learned, so that we can build on it, and then after we've introduced some new knowledge, we can then ask questions to ensure, that learners have understood, and
Tom Beakes: to start expanding that thinking. So again, I'm talking here about a context where we're working in a curricular classroom, so not necessarily in an English language classroom, but in a lesson where they're learning both content and language at the same time. Tom Beakes: And of course, learners at the early stages of learning English might benefit from more questions, establishing basic concepts at the beginning, you know, the simple kind of who, what, where, and when, and that's going to allow them to access the vocabulary that they need to be able to make sense of the topic, as it gets more complex.
Tom Beakes: So that's the sequencing. Tom Beakes: It's also going to be really important to plan any resources needed to support comprehension, and again, we'll come to this later on.
Tom Beakes: This is really critical for our language learners, but, you know, examples are things like visuals, glossaries with simplified definitions or translations, providing written support, so having questions in writing. Tom Beakes: On the board or screen, as well as, verbally.
Tom Beakes: And it may be for new-to-English learners writing translations as well. Tom Beakes: When this is feasible.
Tom Beakes: So let's get into the nitty-gritty stage, and this is the asking. And there's a lot of things to consider here when you… when you start looking at it. But let's start by just considering how we ensure Tom Beakes: our language is as comprehensible as possible to the widest group of pupils, ensuring our… including our learners at the earlier stages of learning English.
Tom Beakes: So, here's an example of a teacher question. Tom Beakes: And hopefully we can agree this use of language is not ideal.
Tom Beakes: for, our learners of English. It's very long. Tom Beakes: There are lots of clauses, there's an embedded clause in there, there's complex language structures, conditional…
Tom Beakes: A keyword, condensation. Tom Beakes: He's hidden away right at the end of the sentence.
Tom Beakes: So… What's the alternative? Tom Beakes: Well, and the simplest thing we can do, and I'm sure those of you who are already EAL, specialists, will do this automatically, is that
Tom Beakes: We simplify or grade our language to make sure our questions are comprehensible to as many verbals as possible. Tom Beakes: So, this means keeping the questions short, to the point, and adjusting the complexity of the language we use as much as possible, without making it unnatural or ungrammatical.
Tom Beakes: So, rather than this example. Tom Beakes: We could just say something really simple.
Tom Beakes: Such as what is condensation, right? Don't need to overcomplicate it. Tom Beakes: And in fact, we don't even need to ask a question. Less is often more, right? You could simply just do something like condensation means…
Tom Beakes: And then your learners… the sentence. Tom Beakes: So… It's definitely very possible to make our language.
Tom Beakes: Much simpler. Tom Beakes: As a starting point.
Tom Beakes: Bye. Tom Beakes: We're gonna do another, chat.
Tom Beakes: Task? Tom Beakes: So… I'm just gonna line and chat to show, last…
Tom Beakes: There we go. Tom Beakes: So, type your answer to the question, when it's field… And… I'll give you…
Tom Beakes: Again, about a minute. Tom Beakes: Don't… share your ideas in the chat until you see the magic. One.
Tom Beakes: The question is, how do you select who is going to answer a question? Tom Beakes: So,
Tom Beakes: For example, you might ask students to put their hands up and choose a student. So you can Tom Beakes: write technique, or you could write your thinking process, I don't mind.
Tom Beakes: You've got about… A minute. Tom Beakes: Okay.
Tom Beakes: So, you can put your answers. Tom Beakes: Fuck.
Tom Beakes: Interesting, so we've got people talking about random selection. Cold call is a term that's coming out a lot. Tom Beakes: Okay.
Tom Beakes: Okay, someone said the higher levels first, to model… Tom Beakes: You could specify who you want to answer their work. Alright, loads of brilliant ideas in there. Okay, and there isn't, you know, necessarily right or wrong answers here, it's all very contextual, but I wanted to get a flavor of what people are doing.
Tom Beakes: And what I'm gonna do… Sorry, I'm looking at all these ideas. What I'm going to do… Tom Beakes: Is just take some of the commonest methods that teachers use all around the world for selecting students, and then just, highlight some of those advantages and disadvantages.
Tom Beakes: So I guess perhaps the most basic technique we could use, Tom Beakes: would be calling out, right? Really ask a question.
Tom Beakes: Then the learners just shout the answer out. Tom Beakes: I'm sure anyone who's been in a classroom for more than 5 minutes
Tom Beakes: Doesn't use this technique, Tom Beakes: for fairly obvious reasons, right? We only hear from the learners who are comfortable shouting out, and it creates a lot of chaos and noise. So, yeah, I don't think anyone's doing that one. Although, you know, I do sometimes still see it
Tom Beakes: The other possibility is, I guess, hands up, and that's perhaps traditionally what a lot of people think of as the method, don't they, for using questions in the classroom? Tom Beakes: But, I think nowadays, a lot of people are moving away from this.
Tom Beakes: As is evidenced in the… in the chat here, Tom Beakes: And that's because for certain kinds of questions.
Tom Beakes: it's really not very helpful. So if we want to assess knowledge, if we want to check understanding or knowledge, then Tom Beakes: Hands up is terrible.
Tom Beakes: For the obvious reason that the children who raise their hands are most likely to be the ones who already know the answer. Tom Beakes: And that's not really very helpful.
Tom Beakes: Or, A teacher understanding If everybody has understood something that they've taught. Tom Beakes: It might be useful, though, in other contexts. So, for example, when we want to generate new ideas, or to get opinions, or reflections, or something like that, then, you know, but there's… there is a time and a place, all hands up.
Tom Beakes: But I think it's certainly becoming less, popular, Tom Beakes: Here in the UK, I know.
Tom Beakes: I'm not sure if that's the case in other places. Tom Beakes: So, another thing that people have mentioned a lot in their responses is nomination, and of course, there are a lot of different ways we can do this. So we might choose to do it in sequence.
Tom Beakes: So that we can keep track Who is answered. Tom Beakes: But, of course, that has quite a large drawback that, you know, learners know where they are in the sequence, and they tend to switch off as soon as they've had their turn, or, you know, when it isn't their turn.
Tom Beakes: And so that can lead to a lot of disengagement. Tom Beakes: So then a lot of teachers prefer to use, random nomination, and I think we've seen people mention some techniques in the chat here, like.
Tom Beakes: people have… some people might use lolly sticks. Somebody's mentioned Cards of Destiny, I like the idea. I'm not sure if that is a random nomination, or if it's, something else, but yeah, the idea is that you can then, choose learners at random, and so all the learners have to stay engaged, because they're not sure if they're going to be called upon to answer. Tom Beakes: So it does keep them on their toes, but again, as soon as learners hear another child's name.
Tom Beakes: they might switch off. So, Jamal… Tom Beakes: what is condensation? And then everyone who's not Jamal stops listening after this point.
Tom Beakes: And again, the engagement might… Fall away. So, Tom Beakes: to avoid this, then, we might try a different tweak to this, which is name-end questioning, which is what's often recommended here in the UK, I know in a lot of schools.
Tom Beakes: So then we ask the question, and the learner's names are clapped. Tom Beakes: to the end.
Tom Beakes: And the idea is there that everyone needs to think of the answer. Tom Beakes: And then one child is called.
Tom Beakes: And I think that's better. Tom Beakes: But again, I think we can also…
Tom Beakes: Improve on this technique as well. Tom Beakes: So, what might be a better method than randomly nominating? Well, one method could be to target your questioning, depending on the type of question you want to ask.
Tom Beakes: This idea I've taken from Tom Beakes: Adam Boxer, who's a UK-based science teacher, I believe, and an education consultant, and he has a very useful blog which goes into loads of detail about this, if you… which I'll share the link with later on.
Tom Beakes: But if you want to check understanding of a concept or an idea from the curriculum, so this is not language necessarily, this is curricular knowledge, then what a teacher might do is assess in their class, you know, who is the strongest in the subject area. Tom Beakes: And kind of divide them up into thirds. Not literally, but just, you know, mentally in their head.
Tom Beakes: So let's say the subject is maths. You've kind of… you might divide your class into three groups in terms of their, Tom Beakes: goodness at maths, I couldn't think of a better terminology. I didn't want to start using words like ability and things. So…
Tom Beakes: In this hypothetical example, let's imagine we've got a class full of learners, Navin is up there in the top third, and Jakob is down there in the bottom third. So, if we want to get a sense of the likelihood that most learners in the class have understood Tom Beakes: Who should we ask? Would it be Navin or Jakob?
Tom Beakes: You can type a one-word, Tom Beakes: You can type a one-word answer in the chat.
Tom Beakes: If you were going to check understanding, which of these learners would you… nominate. Tom Beakes: Okay, I see some people…
Tom Beakes: There isn't a wand for this one, everyone, so you can just… just… just go away, so there's a one word. Tom Beakes: response.
Tom Beakes: Okay. Tom Beakes: At the moment, I'm seeing people sharing, every single person has written, Jaqub, which,
Tom Beakes: I would agree, yes. It would make more sense to ask Jakob, because if he understands, then there's a really good chance that the other two-thirds of learners in the classroom also understand. Tom Beakes: If he doesn't understand, then maybe we can choose someone from one of the other thirds to answer.
Tom Beakes: And yeah, as somebody mentioned, for example. Tom Beakes: Navin might be the learner who could explain, more, or give a more complete answer, perhaps. So these learners in the bottom third are what we call, or what Adam Woxer calls indicators. So.
Tom Beakes: When asking questions to check for understanding, asking an indicator is going to be more useful than just randomly nominating a child. Tom Beakes: And again, if you want to learn more about this concept,
Tom Beakes: He's got a useful blog on that. He goes into a lot of detail. Tom Beakes: So what relevance would this have to our multilingual learners? Well, the main point I would make is that it…
Tom Beakes: it's really important that we don't fall into that trap that just because an EAL learner may have a lower proficiency in English, it doesn't automatically make them an indicator. You know, if you're checking for curricular knowledge. Tom Beakes: We need to have a good understanding of both their proficiency in English and their, curricular,
Tom Beakes: knowledge as well. Of course, if you're checking understanding of a language-related question, then the learner's English proficiency is going to be more relevant, and that might inform your decision. Tom Beakes: Yeah, people have mentioned.
Tom Beakes: Exactly. If Jakob doesn't know or remember, you could get somebody else to explain, and then he could repeat in his own words. Yeah, absolutely. Or he could even just repeat the words of another learner, Tom Beakes: Yeah, that's absolutely… A useful technique.
Tom Beakes: But the important thing is that he gets a chance to respond, and… Tom Beakes: Even if he can't get it right, he again gets a chance to give a correct answer later in the process.
Tom Beakes: So, we've looked at this name-end questioning and targeting as useful techniques when asking questions. Tom Beakes: But there is a drawback to all of these techniques, because they all have their different advantages and disadvantages. And I guess the most obvious drawback of all of the things we've just spoken about
Tom Beakes: is that in terms of participation, they're quite limited, right? We're limiting participation to one student, maybe of two or three, if we're bouncing the question around. Tom Beakes: Excuse me. So, inherently, There's a limited assessment value.
Tom Beakes: So what is the solution to mass participation? And, again, there's probably more than one answer, but certainly one of the solutions that's become very popular, in the UK over the last, kind of, 10, 15 years, are mini whiteboards. And I'm sure many of you will, have used these or have encountered these. Tom Beakes: And again, it's a topic, it could be the topic of an entire webinar, but the reason people love mini whiteboards is that everyone can participate. So, in terms of assessing learning.
Tom Beakes: It's quite a powerful tool. Tom Beakes: And we'll look a little bit more in later sections about where mini whiteboards might come in, but I've certainly seen them used very successfully with multilingual learners of all proficiencies, obviously once they've built up some foundational literacy.
Tom Beakes: Okay. Tom Beakes: So let's move on to our Stage 3, which is, all about supporting
Tom Beakes: our multilingual learners to respond effectively to our questions. And there are two key strategies to consider here. The first one is providing enough thinking time. Tom Beakes: And the second one is scaffolding the language that learners need to answer the question effectively, so providing them support with that.
Tom Beakes: Okay, one more question. I'm sorry, it's a webinar about question… questioning, you're gonna get lots of questions. Tom Beakes: This time, we're gonna think about…
Tom Beakes: This is a very short, simple question, so I'm only going to give you Tom Beakes: a short time to answer, but don't press enter until you see the magic wand. And the question is this.
Tom Beakes: how long do teachers typically wait to nominate a learner after asking a question? This is, like, I'm talking, like, in general, like, on average. Tom Beakes: based on the research, how long do you think… not… not how long for you personally, but… How long?
Tom Beakes: on average. Tom Beakes: Okay.
Tom Beakes: It's fun. Tom Beakes: So, we've got ranging from… 1.5 is the lowest I've seen.
Tom Beakes: Someone's what generally forgets to wait, yeah, that would be… that would be me. Tom Beakes: And I think people have put 10 seconds, 10 to 15 seconds, 20 seconds… wow, okay.
Tom Beakes: So we've got quite a big range there. Well, Tom Beakes: apparently, according to research, or I think this research was done quite a long time ago, so, you know, maybe it's changed. But, there was a sort of classic study, I think in the late 70s, and they found that teachers wait between, yeah.
Tom Beakes: 0.7 and 1.5 seconds before nominating a learner, or before talking themselves. Tom Beakes: And what the research also shows is that by increasing that wait time, Up to just 3 seconds.
Tom Beakes: We can really improve the quality and accuracy of the responses that we get. Tom Beakes: Dylan William, who's a very influential educator in the UK, describes…
Tom Beakes: The questioning process for teachers as, Plan. Ask. Tom Beakes: Stay quiet.
Tom Beakes: Or shut up. Tom Beakes: Which I think is probably quite a good summary, if you want it, of what we've just been talking about.
Tom Beakes: Plan, ask, stay quiet. Tom Beakes: And,
Tom Beakes: Obviously, this is important for all learners, but it's really crucial for learners of English, because, of course, processing that information in a second language and working out what to say in an additional language will take longer. Tom Beakes: So, there's lots of ways that we can build in,
Tom Beakes: This wait time, or this thinking time. Tom Beakes: And the simplest one is just to be quiet. I say simple, it's easy, it's very easy to say, but if you're a teacher like me, who…
Tom Beakes: tends to like the sound of their own voice. It can be a lot harder, and you have to really work Tom Beakes: Work at it.
Tom Beakes: So let's go back to our example, of our name-end questioning. Tom Beakes: What is condensation, Jamal? So, looking again at that question.
Tom Beakes: just have a reflection, you don't need to write anything in the chat, this is just to think about. At what point Tom Beakes: In the question, do we build in the wait time?
Tom Beakes: my question. Where would the wait time go? Tom Beakes: And… Hopefully, you all kind of went, well…
Tom Beakes: That's right. The wait time needs to go before we give the name, before we nominate the student. Otherwise, again, everyone's gonna tune out. Tom Beakes: But of course, waiting or being silent isn't always,
Tom Beakes: a feasible strategy, or a useful strategy, because, you know, it can also lead to students getting quite, disruptive, or… or bored, potentially. So… Tom Beakes: We also need to look at other ways, building in thinking time. And so this is where our friends, the mini whiteboards, come in, because they automatically build in thinking time, as learners have to consider what they're going to write, and they have to wait for everyone to complete, and then, you know, on the signal, 3, 2, 1, everyone…
Tom Beakes: shares their response. Tom Beakes: The idea being, again, a teacher at a glance can get a pretty good understanding very quickly that everyone is on the same page, or…
Tom Beakes: Maybe they need to revisit the, the content or question if the responses are not what the teacher was expecting. Tom Beakes: lots of people have mentioned this as well already, this idea of turning and talk, or think-pair-share is a variation of this. There are lots of different ways that this gets talked about, but…
Tom Beakes: That's where a child would talk to the person next to them briefly. Tom Beakes: And then before sharing back or responding.
Tom Beakes: Yeah, someone's put it out that, Tom Beakes: too long wait time complicates the answer, but that's… I imagine that's also true. But that comes about… I think that's to do with the choosing your questions carefully, and making sure they're pitched at the right level.
Tom Beakes: for the learners, and certainly things like turn and talk and think, pair, and share are not going to be very useful for all questions. I think they're going to be most successful questions that do require quite a lot of Tom Beakes: Thinking and complex thought.
Tom Beakes: And of course, for our multilingual learners, that discussion could potentially be in their home language if they happen to share, if you're teaching learners that share a home language, because Tom Beakes: if they can discuss it more fluently, in more depth, they're more likely to give a better response before they translate that into English. This might be where translanguaging can be quite useful, but again, it will depend on the makeup of your class.
Tom Beakes: There are other very simple techniques in primary, with the younger learners, you know, pretend microphones are great. So, you know, the teacher has the microphone, asks the question. Tom Beakes: And then you can…
Tom Beakes: routinize this with your learners, but you can, you know, you can walk around the classroom and then Tom Beakes: You hand over the microphone to the child you want to answer the question, and that just, again, naturally builds in a bit of waiting time.
Tom Beakes: Equally, you can do this as a turn and talk, where they have microphones, and they would say the question, and then maybe ask their partner, and the partner repeats the question and asks it back. And if you can build that into a routine. Tom Beakes: Quite, it's quite an effective, simple way.
Tom Beakes: Nice, Helen's mentioned having answer buttons to record their answers, so that's… that's a cool idea. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, technology now allows us a lot more, Tom Beakes: Options as well, doesn't it?
Tom Beakes: Especially for, like, rehearsal of language, and not… not having the pressure of saying it out in front of everybody in the class, so yeah. Tom Beakes: And for older learners, you know, you could allow them to take notes for responding, and again, that's something they could do in their home language, if that is going to produce a better response, if that's something that's going to help.
Tom Beakes: Thop. Tom Beakes: individual learner.
Tom Beakes: Okay. Tom Beakes: So that's wait time, and now…
Tom Beakes: let's look at some of the ways that we can scaffold language. And again, none of these ideas, I imagine, will be unfamiliar to you, if you've done Tom Beakes: worked in an EAL context before, but it's worth reminding… it's worth remembering that these are options and making sure that all your colleagues are aware of these techniques, because they're simple but effective.
Tom Beakes: So, using sentence frames and sentence starters. Tom Beakes: So that means providing a fragment of, a phrase or a sentence that you want the learners to use, which they then complete.
Tom Beakes: Here's an example from a primary maths lesson from one of the Bell Foundation's resources. Tom Beakes: So you can see here that the children have been provided with a starter, and of course, you might provide that on the screen, or to the child as a word mat to help them during an activity where they need to use that language.
Tom Beakes: Here's a more complex sentence starter from a resource, an English literature resource. Tom Beakes: with the book, A Woman in Black.
Tom Beakes: And, you can see here that the sentence starter… I did that because Tom Beakes: And then there's an example sentence provided as well.
Tom Beakes: And… Tom Beakes: The slightly more sophisticated cousin, I suppose, of the sentence frame is the substitution table, and I love a good substitution table, and I think they can be really powerful ways to allow multilingual learners to produce longer, more detailed responses than they might otherwise be able to achieve.
Tom Beakes: And they're also really good for familiarizing learners with the grammatical structures, and word order, in particular, of English. Tom Beakes: And different grammatical patterns, and also extending
Tom Beakes: Vocabulary as well, because they're a very, Tom Beakes: It's very easy to include lots of synonyms, for example, for different ways of saying things.
Tom Beakes: In a substitution table, and they're very easy to adjust as well to different language proficiencies. So, this example is from a geography resource, Tom Beakes: Talking about, glaciated landscapes.
Tom Beakes: And… Tom Beakes: You can see that the substitution table has been designed to allow learners to produce longer or shorter sentences according to their language proficiency. So, it's possible to make a really simple sentence if you just use the kind of one-star prompt, so we could say, farming provides jobs.
Tom Beakes: You could extend that using the 1 and 2 star prompt. Farming is good because it provides jobs. Tom Beakes: Or you could extend it even further by including the 3-star
Tom Beakes: prompt. Farming is good for upland areas because it provides jobs. Tom Beakes: And so you can see how we can kind of build out these sentences, and it's a really useful way for learners to kind of be more confident, with expanding their language.
Tom Beakes: You'll also notice at the top there, we've got sentence frames or sentence prompts for asking the question. I think this is part of a, an interactive, like, barrier game or information sharing activity. Tom Beakes: So, we have the questions that one partner will ask in the grey box, and then the responses in the substitution table, and there's also a box for other useful questions in the corner, sort of more incidental language, which you will need when you're trying to share information with a partner.
Tom Beakes: How do you spell that? Can you repeat the question, please? So this… also providing this kind of incidental language, when learners are talking is important. And again, for questioning. Tom Beakes: You know, giving learners the confidence, and allowing… making sure it's okay in your classroom to say, you know.
Tom Beakes: You say that again, please, or could you repeat that, or I didn't quite get that. Because if you have learners with lots of different varieties of English at different stages of proficiency, you know, sometimes they aren't going to understand each other, and that's okay, that's just part of learning a language, you know. It's messy, and… Tom Beakes: Takes time to, to build up your pronunciation and fluency.
Tom Beakes: And, you know, it's always, if you have students who struggle with confidence on pronunciation, it's always a good trick, isn't it, to get them to teach you some of their language, home language, and then listen to you. Tom Beakes: Butcher it and make a horrible attempt.
Tom Beakes: But it's… it's important to show solidarity, isn't it? Tom Beakes: And lastly, we've already touched on this, but another, Strategy might be…
Tom Beakes: translanguaging, and using, home language, again, in this situation. If you're in a classroom where the learners share a home language, or you have groups of learners who share a home language, Tom Beakes: This is especially important where the questions… where the… what's important is the content.
Tom Beakes: of the… of the answer, not the grammatical accuracy of it, you know? So if you're not in a language lesson, what's more important is that they are getting across the curricular ideas. So if they're able to discuss that in their home language first, it might give them an advantage. Tom Beakes: Of course, not always. If a child's been in international school since kindergarten, it may well be that they're a lot more comfortable discussing academic things in English than they are in their home language.
Tom Beakes: Even if their, you know, home language is more… is more fluent in the language that they use more with their friends and family. Tom Beakes: And again, yeah, this is the kind of strategy that might work better when you're trying to get new ideas and opinions
Tom Beakes: From learners, as opposed to assessing understanding. Tom Beakes: So, we've talked about wait time, and then also linguistic support. So, by including both those elements, we're really increasing the chances our plurilingual learners of English can participate.
Tom Beakes: So that brings us to the last stage. Tom Beakes: which we've labeled responding, but again, I'm referring here to the teacher building on and responding to learners' answers to the question.
Tom Beakes: And again, all the strategies I'm going to talk about here are useful for everyone, but we might want to adapt some of them when using them with multilingual learners a little bit. Tom Beakes: So a common technique is, again, it goes by lots of different names, but things like stretch it, say it better.
Tom Beakes: right is right, which is this idea that we promote high expectations. So when learners, you know, we expect them to give a really Tom Beakes: Accurate response, a full response, and we challenged them to…
Tom Beakes: To maybe expand their answer, or to say it. Tom Beakes: Better, or to, you know, include more information, or we challenge them if they haven't got it quite right.
Tom Beakes: And again, it's building a classroom culture of, it's okay to be wrong, you know, we're gonna help you, that's why we're here. Tom Beakes: We're gonna help you get it right.
Tom Beakes: So, again, in this kind of context, we're generally concerned with the content of the response, in terms of the topic we're talking about. Tom Beakes: Probably less important, to worry about fluency, pronunciation, or grammatical accuracy, as long as that isn't completely obscuring what the learner's trying to say.
Tom Beakes: However, if, you know, the learner's given you a brilliant response. Tom Beakes: In terms of the curricular content, but you know that learner can do better in terms of their language, then absolutely we can, you know, we can ask them to stretch it and repeat it.
Tom Beakes: Yeah, Tasman just put a great thing in there. A useful phrase is, right answer, wrong language. Say it better. Love it, yeah, it's a really simple way of doing it. And again, like, these kind of routines in the classroom, once students get used to it, Tom Beakes: are really important. And again, if you're an EAL specialist, this probably comes naturally to you, but for our
Tom Beakes: curricular, specialists or classroom teachers, it's something that they might need, to be reminded of. So, you know, just using techniques like, can you say that again, and maybe this time use the past tense, or… Tom Beakes: Say that again, but, you know, with a better word than nice, or, you know, so they can use a synonym for something, for example.
Tom Beakes: Another common technique is recasting. That's simply repeating the response back to the learner, but changing it and making it, Tom Beakes: fuller, again, With multilingual learners, we can recast with upgraded language that's appropriate to the learner.
Tom Beakes: And then maybe we can ask them to repeat That back to us. Tom Beakes: Any other technique is… well, it can be called bounce. I call it Bounce,
Tom Beakes: Again, one of these acronyms that I've come across is… Tom Beakes: Pose, as in, ask the question, pose.
Tom Beakes: pause… Pounce, as in nominate, bounce. Tom Beakes: And that's the idea that you are then offering the question out to other learners to expand or improve on the answer. So again, this is where we're making use of our knowledge of the language proficiency in the classroom, because we could bounce the question to a learner
Tom Beakes: Who may struggle Tom Beakes: Because if we bounce the question to a learner who, you know, doesn't have the language proficiency, they're not going to produce an effective answer. So, you know, we can choose somebody, perhaps, who's stronger at the language to…
Tom Beakes: To produce a model answer, and then maybe come back to the original learner. Tom Beakes: And this could also be an opportunity to encourage translanguaging, again, to promote fluency. So perhaps…
Tom Beakes: If you're in a context where all the learners share a home language, you know, it's okay for them to… Tom Beakes: Drop into their home language for a word or phrase that they don't have, as part of their response, just to keep the…
Tom Beakes: the momentum going of their thinking. Tom Beakes: So normalizing that kind of activity can be… can be useful in some contexts.
Tom Beakes: And this idea of returning to the original student who answered a question incorrectly or incompletely to get a correct response is labeled looping. Tom Beakes: by some educators. So, again, by labeling it, you know, I think it just makes it easier to talk about.
Tom Beakes: And I think this is especially impactful for our language learners, because it's giving them the chance to repeat that key language and an upgraded language. Tom Beakes: Even if perhaps they're not quite right there yet in terms of producing it spontaneously.
Tom Beakes: Okay, how are we doing for time? All right. Are we doing alright. Okay. Tom Beakes: So, we're going to move on to checking understanding and thinking about that from a linguistic perspective. And there are two acronyms here in this sign, ICQs and CCQs, and if any of you have done any English language teacher training in the past.
Tom Beakes: You will have encountered these, but if you haven't. Tom Beakes: Then, ICQs stands for Instruction Checking Questions, CCQs is Concept Checking Questions.
Tom Beakes: First of all, we'll come to this point, about checking understanding, and that is that, as a rule of thumb, it's not very helpful to use this question. Do you understand? Tom Beakes: We can illustrate this with some… Adorable pets.
Tom Beakes: Why not? Tom Beakes: And that's because… If you ask, do you understand?
Tom Beakes: You could get… The answer, yes. Tom Beakes: And that could mean the learner has understood completely and correctly, which is what we want. Wonderful.
Tom Beakes: You could get the answer, yes. Tom Beakes: When the learner thinks they understand, but actually, they haven't.
Tom Beakes: We get the answer, yes. Tom Beakes: When they've sort of understood some of it, but we don't know which part they've understood and which part they haven't understood.
Tom Beakes: And we can get the answer, yes. Tom Beakes: Where the learner didn't understand anything, but doesn't want to admit it.
Tom Beakes: And certainly, Just like me when I'm… Tom Beakes: Talking to someone in a foreign language, you know?
Tom Beakes: Not and smile, and just hope that whatever they've said to me is, it's okay to do that. Tom Beakes: So we have the same answer, but four completely different levels of actual understanding.
Tom Beakes: is what I want to get across. Tom Beakes: So… okay.
Tom Beakes: hopefully I've convinced you, asking, do you understand, is unhelpful. And that means we need to use other kinds of questions, and this is where our check-in questions come in. And normally. Tom Beakes: They're quite short.
Tom Beakes: closed questions that are linguistically simple to answer. So often they can be answered with one word, or a short answer. Tom Beakes: And again, we can divide these into our instruction checking questions to make sure that learners know what to do before a task or activity. And concept checking questions, where we're checking that they've understood the concept or idea
Tom Beakes: being talked about, or the piece of vocabulary. That, you're using. Tom Beakes: So…
Tom Beakes: Again, these terms are commonly used in language teaching, and they're useful for all learners, not just our multilingual learners. Tom Beakes: So, here's an example of instruction checking questions, and again, I'm sure all teachers do this to some extent. They may not always kind of label them.
Tom Beakes: So I'm not gonna go into lots of detail there. Tom Beakes: But again, if we think about…
Tom Beakes: Learners just take that little bit longer to process, if they're listening in another language. Tom Beakes: Asking these questions is… is quite important. As is, making sure you're… Instructions are carefully scaffolded.
Tom Beakes: Okay. Tom Beakes: I'm…
Tom Beakes: And for the final couple of minutes, let's look at an example of concept checking questions, because these are more complicated, and they will look different in different subject areas, but they're extremely important. Tom Beakes: for checking the understanding of, particularly vocabulary, our multilingual learners. And it's also something that's quite easy to do ineffectively, I think. So I'm going to give you a bit of a counterexample.
Tom Beakes: In this scenario, we're in a science lesson talking about voltage and circuits and things like that, and there's a paragraph which mentions a toaster. Tom Beakes: But there is no picture.
Tom Beakes: So, let's imagine that the academic vocabulary has been already taught, because it's kind of the key vocabulary, that's been covered in the lesson, or in a previous lesson. The teacher knows, the learner knows that vocabulary, but they're not sure if the learner's going to know the word toaster. Tom Beakes: And sure enough, one of the… one of our EA learners asks, what is a toaster?
Tom Beakes: And… Perhaps the teacher responds with a short explanation. Maybe the learner still looks a bit confused. Tom Beakes: So, maybe we need to ask some questions here to check.
Tom Beakes: No doubt. Tom Beakes: Has sort of understood this explanation.
Tom Beakes: And this is where I've seen teachers get themselves into all kinds of difficulties. Tom Beakes: So, I'll ask you to reflect, you know, how would you check the understanding of this word?
Tom Beakes: with the learner at the early acquisition stage. You don't have to write anything in the chat. Tom Beakes: You can have a thing.
Tom Beakes: And here's how you probably wouldn't do it, which is to bombard the learner with lots of these different kind of questions. Tom Beakes: You know, do we use it in the kitchen? Does it make the bread hot or cold? Do you use a toaster to make breakfast?
Tom Beakes: This is something in English language teaching that teachers are often taught is… Tom Beakes: Better than just giving a definition.
Tom Beakes: I think the idea is that you're sort of eliciting information from the learner, but I think, often, these can just cause confusion. Tom Beakes: Because if the learner… if the learner knows the word, then the answers are just going to seem really obvious.
Tom Beakes: And they're just gonna get confused. And if they don't know the word, then they just… Tom Beakes: That is to be at the loss.
Tom Beakes: So, you know, it's really important to ask ourselves, you know, does the learner know the concept? Tom Beakes: are they gonna be familiar with this idea in their home language? And if the answer is yes, then, you know, just keep it simple. We'll give them a visual or a direct translation.
Tom Beakes: that's gonna be much easier, you know? This is a toaster, or toaster is… and give them the home language, or… Tom Beakes: If, you know, you don't have their home language, you ask another child who you know would be able to translate it.
Tom Beakes: And again, visuals are your friend, right? And where possible, a visual's gonna be far more useful than any kind of question. Tom Beakes: So… Just in terms of using concept checking questions,
Tom Beakes: Here are some pro- questions just to… Tom Beakes: help you think about doing it. Do you actually need a question to clarify the meaning of the word, or can you just use a visual?
Tom Beakes: Is understanding this word critical to the task or the topic? Tom Beakes: If it's not, then, you know, Probably ignore it.
Tom Beakes: Are there any words that you get confused with, or how do you disambiguate? So, you know, toaster, tooth. Tom Beakes: I don't know, could cause confusion, I suppose.
Tom Beakes: What are the key semantic features of the word? And again. Tom Beakes: do, you know, a week's worth of, workshops talking about that. But, what I mean by that is
Tom Beakes: Things like level of formality, is it more academic, is it more social? You know, is it specific to a particular subject area? Tom Beakes: Is it positive? Is it negative? You know, if it's an adjective, is it… is it kind of something you could use in any situation, or is it got…
Tom Beakes: particular connotation. Tom Beakes: And how and when is an image typically used? Yeah, an image is worth a thousand words, Alejandro has put in the chat, which is generally true, but I would just caution, because some words are not easily shown with visuals, and that's where you do need to bring out the concept checking questions. So when we're starting to get into more abstract concepts and things like that.
Tom Beakes: Okay, let's wrap up, and… Tom Beakes: Just some things to look out for when we're using questions.
Tom Beakes: And I'm sure lots of these will already be familiar, but for the purposes of summarizing. Tom Beakes: Remember that questions in English can be structurally quite complicated compared to other languages. You know, we do funny things with word order and…
Tom Beakes: don't get me started about tag questions, you know, just when we tag a bit on the end, like, we studied this last week, didn't we? That was interesting, wasn't it? And the verb has to… the tag… the tag has to agree with the… Tom Beakes: Poor learners of English, you can understand they must be banging their heads. Whereas a lot of languages, questions are just… you say a sentence, and you add a question particle on the end of it, and that's it.
Tom Beakes: There's the obvious trap, which we touched on a little bit with the CCQs, which is one of the reasons students don't answer or think about questions is because they don't seem worth answering, because they're just Tom Beakes: kind of obvious or rhetorical, so don't, you know, ask too many obvious questions.
Tom Beakes: They just kill the culture in the classroom of questioning and answering. Tom Beakes: Be careful with rephrasing and reformulating. I see teachers do this a lot with language learners, the AL students, where the student is processing, doesn't… maybe hasn't understood completely, or it's just processing, and then the teacher says the same question, but rephrases it.
Tom Beakes: And then that completely throws the learner, because they're like, oh, they've suddenly got a completely new bit of language. And it might have been that, actually, often it's better just to repeat the question as you originally said it. Tom Beakes: Than it is to keep rephrasing it.
Tom Beakes: Because, you know, rephrasing is a really common, strategy for… Tom Beakes: fluent speakers of English, but it's not always the most useful thing.
Tom Beakes: Unless, of course, you know that you've phrased the question really badly, or very long-windedly. Tom Beakes: And that's related to this sort of bait-and-switch idea, which is where you start asking one question, and then you rephrase it, but actually you maybe add another bit to it, or you change the question, because, you know, you're already thinking ahead or something, and again, that can be really confusing for everybody, but for our language learners especially.
Tom Beakes: And as I've mentioned, overuse of simple questions can really be quite damaging, in terms of engagement and willingness to listen. Tom Beakes: So, try and be judged.
Tom Beakes: Okay, I think that's all we have time for, and I don't know if there were any questions, Emily, that we didn't manage to cover. Emily Curran: Thanks, Tom. No, there didn't seem to be any questions in the chat, but, that was a really interesting, webinar. I think everyone will agree, and really great to have, some reminders of some, some, you know, and build… and build on those. So, so thank you very much,
Emily Curran: And I just sort of wanted to say that that's going to bring us to the end of our webinar, and it will be the last one before the summer break. Emily Curran: So we'll be running some more webinars in the autumn, so do keep an eye on our website, or you might want to join our mailing list.
Emily Curran: And we also offer online courses, aimed at different roles, and early bird discounts are available for early bookings. So here's a little selection of the training that we have coming up at the end of this year. Emily Curran: So assessing the language proficiency of learners, an EL coordinators course, and, adaptive teaching as well.
Emily Curran: So, those are available, to book onto, for next year. And just a quick reminder then, that you'll get an email within 48 hours with a link to the video recording of this webinar, and the links to the resources, that were mentioned today by Tom. Emily Curran: Thank you everybody for attending, and joining us today. Thank you very much again to Tom for such an interesting webinar, and we look forward to seeing you, again soon. So, take care and enjoy the rest of your day, evening, or night, wherever you are.
Tom Beakes: Thanks for joining, everyone. Tom Beakes: Bye.

Zum Nachlesen

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