I handed the generally unsatisfying test results out to my students today. I told them up front that I wasn’t happy with the results, but immediately told them I thought I was at least partly to blame for them. It was their first big English test of this year, and it’s never productive to start off on a negative note. I sincerely felt responsible and desperately wanted to fix it.
So I went to work early this morning to get some of my other course books out and searched for any occurrences of the question tag in them. I found some in a course book from a lower level, which suited my immediate need just fine. It just dealt with question tags with the auxiliary verb “to be”.
After handing out the tests, and letting them vent for a couple of minutes, I told my students I know that question tags are quite difficult for anyone (Dutch) to grasp, because for one, we don’t have this phenomenon in Dutch. Second of all, they had to be able to form question tags with both auxiliary verbs and main verbs in both the present and past tense (taking into account the irregular verbs). I told them I thought there was a lot for them to think about while doing that particular assignment and that I could imagine that they were struggling with it. I offered to explain it to them constructively and that there would be a small re-test on the subject which they can use to improve the mark they got on their test.
I started explaining on the board that question tags are like batteries. This is what I wrote/drew:
I told them that a question tag has two parts: the part before and the part after the comma. Since a question tag is like a battery, one side has to be positive and the other negative. A battery can’t have two positive or two negative sides; it wouldn’t work. I asked them, looking at this sentence, how they could tell which side was positive and which side was negative. Soon some hands were up in the air and they knew the answer: if there’s ‘not’ (or an abbreviation of ‘not’) in the sentence part, it is the negative side.
Then I started to get more technical. I asked them whether they knew what the main verb in the first part was. Once they agreed that it was ‘is’, I underlined it. In order to form a question tag, I told them, they’d have to put this main verb in the spot right behind the comma. Then I asked them for the subject of the sentence, and I underlined ‘he’. I said that they needed to put the subject behind the main verb in the question tag. This way we ended up with a battery that was positive on both sides, so I asked them to make the question tag negative. We worked on some other examples, where I presented them with the first part of the sentence, and they had to form the question tag using a think-aloud procedure; they had to tell the rest of the class and me how they arrived at their answer. Once the majority seemed to have gotten the hang of it, I presented them with the ‘silly little beast’ from yesterday’s post.
First, I asked them to identify whether the first part of the sentence was positive or negative. They all saw that it was positive. How so? I asked them. They were able to tell me that it was positive because the lack of the word ‘not’ in the first part. So, the question tag needed to be negative, was the follow-up comment made. Correct!
I asked them for the main verb and the subject of the first part of the sentence. This is what they came up with:
Of course, this battery is faulty, since it has two positive sides. I told my students they only needed to make the question tag negative. How could you do this? I asked them. This is what they came up with, which actually showed me they knew how to apply the rule.
I praised them for thinking along the right lines, but had the unfortunate news that ‘amn’t’ doesn’t exist, and that this would be an exception to the rules they had just learned. I presented them with the correct version and put them to work on the assignments I copied from another course book.
We checked our answers together, and whenever they gave their answer, they had to explain to the class how they came up with the answer, in essence reiterating the rules they used. Most of them (with an exception of one) knew this material and could apply it. Some of them told me they were relieved I explained it to them again and that we were taking this topic more slowly and in chunks. They were relieved they understood the material thus far. At the end of the lessons I handed out other copies for them to do as homework. The exercises were more difficult because they not only dealt with question tags with the auxiliary verb ‘to be’ but also with other auxiliary verbs. However, they only need to apply the same rules they applied when working with ‘to be’. I hope by giving the material to them as homework, they have to take the stuff from this class out of the working memory and consolidate it so that it can travel from there to their permanent memory.
Next lesson will entail a short repetition of this lesson while checking their answers on their homework and then extending their knowledge into the realm of the main verb in first the present, and then the past tense. In a week they will be re-tested and hopefully show a lot more understanding of the material.
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