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LCB-TTC – Taller didáctico

Teacher: Gladys Baya


Student: María Pérez Armendáriz

Observation
Eliciting: teacher prompts1
Date: November 4, 2008.
No. of students: 13.
Age: ±16
Level: Intermediate.
Book: Laser B2, MacMillan.

Background
Teachers elicit for a range of reasons: to set students thinking in a certain direction; to steer them
towards a certain pre-planned topic or lesson objective; to create a context; to warm a class up; to
generate peer interaction/correction; to lead into an activity; to attract and focus attention; to
increase student talking time; to allow the teacher to assess what is already known about a particular
topic, structure or arena of vocabulary; to draw out passive knowledge; and to tap into the students
as a learning resource and engage them in the learning process.

Observation notes

Wait
Teacher prompts Student response
time
1 'Can you give me a direct question?' /// 'Can you give me your telephone number?'
'From present continuous to past
2 'Can you tell me another change of tense?' //
continuous.'
'Rocio, where did you leave your 'She asked me where I had left my
3 /
homework? Tell Cintia.' homework.'
'What about the future?' ///
4
'What do we do with the future?' / 'Change it to conditional.'
5 'Can we omit that here or not?' // 'Yes.'
6 'Can we say 'ever frighten'?' // [No answer, so the teacher answers herself.]
7 'Yesterday changes to ...?' / 'The day before.'
'How can we you solve this?' ////
8 'Who did it?' //
'Sofi?' / [Student provides the answer.]
'What is Jenny's connection to the media?' ///
9
'What have we been talking about?' / 'A reality show.'
Analysis

1
Topic taken from Classroom Observation Tasks, Ruth Wajnryb, (CUP, 1992).

LCB-TTC – Taller Didáctico – Observation 10 – María Pérez Armendáriz 1


1. Consider the data you have collected. Is there any pattern in the language the teacher used?
For example, are the following used: open questions ('What do you think of ...?'); closed
questions ('What's the word for ...?'); imperative prompts ('Tell me what you know about ...');
directed questions ('Anton, what can you tell me about ...?')?
There was a pattern with the use of a kind of closed question. The teacher used the yes/no
question 'Can you/we ...?' most times in order to get an elaborate answer. During the lesson there
were not many open-ended questions and all of them were addressed to the class as a whole.

2. Do you think the type of pattern that the teacher uses has an influence on whether students
respond? Or on how students respond? Can we link the question form with the notion of
ease/difficulty? Can we link it to the form of the response? Consider, for example, binary
questions (offering a choice of two answers) or open-ended questions.
The most common eliciting question she used ('Can you/we ...'?) certainly limits the kind of
answer she will get. The students do not know whether to answer the with the a simple and correct
'yes/no' and risk being asked something else to elaborate on the answer, or simply keep quiet and
leave it to the others to deal with.
I do not think that the question form is the reason why students find it difficult to answer. There
are cases where the question is of a very simple form, but it requires the student to reason out how
to respond to it. It is a matter of the kind of answer that the teacher wants. For example, open-ended
questions are not difficult but for the number of ways they can be answered; binary answers do
corner students with a 50% chance of getting it 'wrong' (they always see the glass half empty).

3. What did you notice about waiting time? Did this seem to influence students in any way?
What did you notice about any subsequent re-formulations?
The teacher usually waited for a few seconds before asking another question when she received
no answer. The waiting time got smaller each time she asked something again. I think this led the
students to answer more quickly if the first time they did not give the answer.

4. Consider the purposes that eliciting served in the lesson you watched. For each one of the
entries you recorded under Teacher prompts, consider what purpose was intended or achieved,
for example, 'Who can tell me where the Amazon is?' might be used to lead into the topic of
the lesson.
1. To lead into the topic of the lesson.
2. To assess what is already known about a particular topic, structure or arena of vocabulary.
3. To generate peer interaction.
4. To assess what is already known about a particular topic, structure or arena of vocabulary.
5. To assess what is already known about a particular topic, structure or arena of vocabulary.
6. To increase student talking time.
7. To assess what is already known about a particular topic, structure or arena of vocabulary.
8. To generate peer interaction/correction.
9. To create a context; to increase student talking time.

5. Is it possible to establish a link between:


- the purpose of the question;
- the form of the question;
- the way the teacher responds to student response(s)?
There may be a link between the purpose of the question and the form. However, this link may
not be the same for all teachers. There is a personal choice involved in the way the teacher chooses
to elicit something from the student. I suppose that some questions have a fixed purpose, for
example, open questions are meant for the class to participate and increase the student talking time;
short answer questions are useful to guide students towards an certain topic. But there are cases
where only the teacher knows why she has chosen that type of question, for example, in this lesson,

LCB-TTC – Taller Didáctico – Observation 10 – María Pérez Armendáriz 2


the teacher used an excess of yes/no questions ('Can you/we...?') to elicit not only yes or no, but an
example or more elaborate answer as well.

6. Are there any times in a lesson when you think it is better for the teacher to tell the students
rather than attempt to elicit something from them?
Usually lack of time leads the teacher to tell a rule, or whatever they are supposed to infer. Also,
with vocabulary, there are some issues with abstract concepts that may cause difficulty at the time
of eliciting. But for the most part, the teacher should make an effort to elicit what she wants from
the students since this makes them think, recall, and infer from what they know. It is a good
exercise that goes beyond the English classroom.

Reflection
You may like to monitor your own eliciting patterns by recording some of your teaching.
Contrast your predictions about your own eliciting with the data you collect.
This is not possible at the moment, but thinking about my future teaching experiences I have
seriously considered recording my lessons for personal and peer analysis. But this is my prediction:
I will elicit in ways that do nor quite work; I will try to guide my students with questions that
requires simple answers so as to take it from those answer to something else; I will do some thing
right and many things wrong; I will learn from my mistakes.

LCB-TTC – Taller Didáctico – Observation 10 – María Pérez Armendáriz 3

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