What about your concept questions? The famous CCQ’s

CCQ’s in the TEFL jargon which we all love to use are those questions which you need to ask right after you have taught something, be it a grammar point of a functional exponent, and they are also the questions you need to ask right after you have presented or recalled a word or a group of words.  Generations of my CELTA, TEFL and DELTA trainees have agonised over their CCQ’s and this is a short article to help them as I have not found much written on them in the standard methodology texts which I recommend. Imagine you have just presented the following words using the techniques listed next to each one. 1. thumb you  put up and then pointed to your thumb 2. pet you pointed to a magazine picture of a dog 3. starving you rubbed your stomach and pointed to your mouth Now, how can this be misunderstood you might ask? Well, in several ways and here are some: ‘thumb’ may be taken to mean ‘any finger‘ (or even “hitch-hike‘!), ‘pet’, the particular dog breed in your picture and ‘starving’ may be understood to mean  ‘I have stomach-ache‘ or even ‘I’m feeling sick‘. Not all your students, I hasten to say, will have necessarily misunderstood, and, if so, not all in the same way! There are infinite possibilities for all sorts of levels and kinds of misunderstanding.   Some Bad Questions Benjamin Reay via Compfight What is the most popular way of making sure students have understood?  Yes, you have guessed […]