Clare Lavery, British Council

An essential skill in communicating and keeping up a conversation is the ability to ask questions. Students sometimes get lots of chances to answer questions but here is how you can get them to make some questions themselves! These activities can be used with a whole range of levels.

FAQs challenge
Tell students that they are preparing information on a topic for a booklet or a website e.g. tourist information for their town, information about their school system, information about customs or music in their country.
1. Students in groups or pairs brainstorm a list of six to eight frequently asked questions on the subject.
2. The whole class pool their questions and discuss them.
3. Students prepare the answers in the next lesson.

Quiz question challenge
A quiz game based on recent vocabulary and topics covered can form the basis of this game with a twist. It has been played successfully with beginners!
1. Read aloud the answers from your quiz cards
2. In teams students must guess what the question is! Allow conferring between team members.
Award two points for getting the question exactly right and one point for providing a question which makes sense and gets the answer, e.g. if the answer is '21', the questions could be 'How many students are there in this class? (two points) and 'How old is the assistant?' (one point)

These activities originally appeared on the British Council Language Assistant internet site.

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