An effective way to develop your EAL learners questioning is to use this classroom strategy.
Rather than always asking EAL learners questions you could give them the answers instead and they have to think of the questions.
This has a number of advantages that include:
- You have given them the content so they might be filling in gaps with prior knowledge that they may not have.
- They are practising formulating questions and therefore developing the language of questioning.
- By working with others they might hear higher order questions which is a good skills for all learners.
I have used this strategy in a number of content classrooms. For example, I have used it after students have learnt content from a particular topic. I then give students answers from the content they have studied and then get them in small groups of pairs to write the questions. As a class we share each others questions and discuss which questions were most effective and why.
EAL in the Daylight 