Activity

Making Questions about the Constructive Speech

This is based on One World 3 Lesson 7.

I already did six classes with this, and all turned out really well. I hope the same goes for your class.

The powerpoint is an introduction to making questions.

I made sure to highlight that debate questions are for:
1) clarifying points
2) asking for specific data, numbers, or definitions (the textbook used "food loss" and "food waste")
3) are not used to attack, so no leading questions

Slide 5 is the start of the activity.
After checking the meaning of the resolution/motion, you can give the students the "Identifying the Good Questions..." worksheet. Everyone gets a copy.

The worksheet has three parts. I found that it's a good exercise to have the students try to understand the speeches first, before checking the meaning of the whole thing with them. I made sure to make the speeches brief - with 3-4 sentences.

All the students need to do is put a check before the question that they think is good. You can check this together using slide 6-8. I put animations on the keywords that are related to the questions. It would be nice if you can go through the answers and have the students tell you why they thought the Q was good/bad.

After this activity, I gave them the tip to look out for adjectives 形容詞. And then decide if this can be answered with data or numbers. A simple example for instance, if the speech says "Doraemon is tall" - a good question would be "How tall is Doraemon?" then it would yield a concrete answer like "Doraemon is 164 cm"

Or like in the activity "School lunch is nutritious" - Variations of "How nutritious is the school lunch?" or "What nutrients can we get from school lunch?" yields concrete answers so they are good questions.

Or "Many students have food allergies" - "How many students have allergies?" or "What kind of food allergies?" are also good questions.

In university speak, questions that yield ~empirical data~.

Then, the last activity is done in groups. Have the students make two questions about the Negative Constructive Speech about the same resolution.

Given a good introduction and practice activity, you'll be happy to find that they actually can make really good questions. Good luck!

Files:
Small files
  • Y3-43 Crafting Questions about the Constructive Speech.pdf (100 KB)
  • Y3-43 Identifying the Good Questions about the Constructive Speeches.pdf (307 KB)
  • Medium files (requires an account to download) -
  • Y3-44 Making Questions about the Constructive Speech.pptx (31.3 MB)
  • 2
    Submitted by dominiquednl February 1, 2023 Estimated time: 50 minutes

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