49 ESL Conversation Games & Activities - Jackie Bolen 2020
2: Teach students how to ask questions
Top 10 tips for teaching english conversation
Conversation is a two-way street and in order to be good at it, our students need to know how to ask questions. Conversation is not simply asking and answering something like:
A: “How was your weekend?”
B: “It was good.”
A better conversation would look like:
A: “How was your weekend?”
B: “It was good, I saw a movie.”
A: “Really? What movie?”
Or,
A: “How was your weekend?”
B: “It was a bit boring, I just stayed home. How about you?”
A: “Oh, mine was fun, I went to ... .”
I remind my students of the key question words: who/what/when/why/where/how and tell them that they can almost always use a couple of them to ask a follow-up question to their conversation partner. Also, teach students question forms; it's maybe not as obvious as you think since questions are formed in a variety of grammatical ways in other languages and students may not know how to make them.
For example, even my very advanced level students in Korea still make mistakes with the negative past question forms (“Why didn't you went to work yesterday?” Or, “Why don't you go to work yesterday?”). Knowing a little bit about the first language of your students can be quite useful in understanding the errors that they're making.
Statements in English often follow the pattern of Subject-Verb-Object (He speaks Italian). There is no auxiliary verb in this statement, so the helping verb “do” is used in the question form (Does he speak Italian?).
If there is an auxiliary verb in the statement, it is inverted with the subject when it is made into a question. For example:
He can speak English. ---> Can he speak English?
These are only the most basic of examples and it can be far more complicated; even high level students are easily confused about how to make the question forms so reviewing them periodically will be useful in helping our students learn how to engage in conversations.
Additionally, an important speaking sub-skill that is useful but which our students often aren't that confident in is initiating a conversation. We can teach them a few strategies, appropriate topics, and useful phrases to help them with this. Use some discretion to know what kinds of questions are appropriate in your particular situation because it can vary so much from country to country.