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Helping B1 learners use interrogative clauses for yes-

no questions and wh-questions

Word Count (2491)

Contents Page Number

1. Introduction 11.1 Why focus on the interrogative clause?1.2 Scope

2. Analysis 1-32.1 Use2.2 Form

2.2.1 Subject-auxiliary inversion2.2.2 Two types of IC2.2.3 Preposition stranding

2.3 Phonological form2.4 Meaning

2.4.1 Affirmative Y-NQs2.4.2 Affirmative wh-Qs2.4.3 Neutral versus focused Y-NQs2.4.4 Negative Y-NQs

3. Problems and Solutions 3-63.1 Use

3.1.1 Problem3.1.2 Solution 13.1.3 Solution 2

3.2 Form3.2.1 Problem3.2.2 Solution

3.3 Phonology3.3.1 Problem3.3.2 Solution

3.4 Meaning3.4.1 Problem3.4.2 Solution 13.4.3 Solution 2

4. Conclusion 65. Bibliography 6-7

5.1 Research materials5.2 Resource materials

6. Appendices 8-15

Helping B1 learners use interrogative clauses Chad Langford, Candidate Number 007

1. Introduction

1.1 Why focus on the interrogative clause?

The focus of this Language Systems Assignment is interrogative clauses (henceforth ICs) in English. I have chosen this topic for several reasons.

First, ICs are a crucial part of communicative competence at any level: all learners of English regularly find themselves in situations where they wish either to query the veracity of a proposition or to fill in some gap in their knowledge. Question-asking serves a major social function (Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, 1999), ranging from the merely phatic to more important social interaction such as asking for directions.

Second, accurate ICs emerge slowly in learners’ interlanguage. My own experience has revealed that even advanced learners fail to produce accurate ICs consistently when they are not monitoring their output. It is thus an important topic to treat throughout the entire learning life-span. Lightbown and Spada (2013), referring to Pienemann, Johnston and Brindley (1988), highlight the stages learners from a variety of language backgrounds go through when acquiring ICs in English. By recycling the teaching of questions, we increase the chances of reaching learners who are not poised to advance to the next stage simultaneously.

Third, the mechanisms underlying ICs in English and their characteristic subject-auxiliary inversion are typologically rare. Do-insertion, especially, would appear to have no correlate in any other language: the topic is thus relevant irrespective of learners’ L1. My own learners struggle with do-insertion. Preposition stranding (see 2.2.3, below) meets with resistance among speakers whose languages disallow it.

Finally, ICs are a rich topic of investigation insofar as issues of form, pronunciation and meaning/use converge nicely, providing teachers with opportunities to address question-asking globally.

1.2 Scope

The topic is vast. I therefore limit the scope of my discussion to independent ICs ((Where) does she work?), including those with a wh-word as subject (Who works here?). I do not treat embedded ICs (Do you know if/where she works?). I also limit my discussion to ICs used to ask questions and do not treat any rhetorical uses of ICs. Nor do I treat question tags (You’re coming, aren’t you?), echo questions (You saw who!?) or non-clausal questions (Who with?).

2. Analysis

2.1 Use

The IC (a form) is the clause type most widely used to formulate questions (a function) in English. Conversely, questions in English are most often posed via an IC. This is not the case for all languages; Italian, for instance, most often relies on intonation alone to signal that a syntactically declarative clause is a question. For our purposes, a question is an utterance that straightforwardly seeks an answer or response.

Thus defined, the relationship between IC and question is a clear example of the form-function interface described by Aarts (2011): the function of asking a question is

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regularly fulfilled by the form of an IC. Note that this does not mean ICs are used only to ask questions or that questions can be formulated only with ICs.

2.2 Form

The main formal characteristics of ICs are as follows:

2.2.1 Subject-auxiliary inversion

Contrary to declarative clause word order, the subject of an independent IC is preceded by a single auxiliary verb (aspectual be or have, copular or passive be, or a modal auxiliary): Who are you? Can you help me? When viewed as a derivation from an underlying declarative word order, the subject and auxiliary here are said to have undergone subject-auxiliary inversion. For simple (= non-progressive) present and past verbs, where no auxiliary is available, the empty operator do assumes the role of auxiliary in what is called do -insertion : Where does he live? What did she say?

2.2.2 Two types of IC

There are two major types of IC. I find yes-no question (Y-NQ) and wh -question (wh-Q) the most transparent terminology to use with learners. The two types are syntactically comparable, the only difference being that, in a wh-Q, the pre-subject auxiliary is preceded by a single- or multi-word interrogative constituent: who(m), whose, what, when, where, why, how, which. When the interrogative constituent is the grammatical subject, there is no subject-auxiliary inversion (Who came? What happened?), and do-insertion, when used, has a specific discursive function (emphasis or contrast, for instance: So, who did come, after all?).

2.2.3 Preposition stranding

When the clause-initial interrogative word or constituent is the object of a preposition, it is most often, in ordinary English, separated from that preposition, which is found clause finally: Who are you looking for?, where ‘who’ is the object of ‘for’. This is commonly referred to as preposition stranding (Declerck, 1991). The fronting of an entire prepositional phrase (To whom am I accountable?) is characteristic of a higher (usually written) register.

2.3 Phonological form

The intonation pattern of Y-NQs contrasts with that of wh-Qs; the former (usually) show rising intonation whereas the latter (usually) have an intonation contour akin to that of declarative sentences, i.e. falling intonation. Exceptions to this generalization fall beyond the scope of this assignment.

2.4 Meaning

The meaning and use of an IC depend both on the type of IC it is and on whether the IC is affirmative or negative. The meaning of focused Y-NQs, furthermore, contrasts with that of non-focused Y-NQs.

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2.4.1 Affirmative Y-NQs

Affirmative Y-NQs usually query the overall veracity of a proposition: given the non-finite proposition {YOU – WORK ON TUESDAYS}, the IC Do you work on Tuesdays? seeks to determine whether or not your working on Tuesdays is valid. ‘Yes’ or ‘no’ is always a logical (though not the only possible) answer to a Y-NQ.

2.4.2 Affirmative wh-Qs

Affirmative wh-Qs are used to query only part of the proposition, either an argument (Who’s coming? (subject); Who did you invite? (object)) or an adverbial adjunct (When are they coming? Why is she complaining?). An appropriate answer provides the information.

2.4.3 Neutral versus focused Y-NQs

Y-NQs are either neutral or focused (Givón, 1993). When focused, they seek not the overall validity of a proposition, but rather specific information contained within it. Focused questions have a specific intonation pattern depending on which element is being focused. Contrast, for instance, neutral Is she coming tomorrow? and focused Is she coming tomorrow? The answer ‘No, she isn’t’ answers a neutral question, whereas ‘No, but John is’ answers the focused question.

2.4.4 Negative Y-NQs

Negative Y-NQs are discursively marked insofar as they presuppose that the asker of the question has some prior expectation concerning the response (Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, 1999). The asker of the question Are you coming? queries the addressee in a fairly neutral way whereas the negative Y-NQ Aren’t you coming? betrays a prior expectation the asker feels is being contradicted: You’re not coming? But I thought you were. This choice often translates disappointment or annoyance (Quirk et al., 1985).

3. Problems and Solutions

3.1 Use

3.1.1 Problem

As do many teachers, I tend to focus too much on the form of ICs and not enough on use. The result: learners, when monitoring, complete an exercise with relative accuracy, but revert to non-target forms in more open-ended fluency activities. When learners are not given enough context-embedded opportunities to use ICs in meaningful ways, we accentuate a disconnect between grammatical form and real-life use.

3.1.2 Solution 1

This proposal shifts the focus to authentic activities with opportunities for learners to formulate ICs. Example: a context is established wherein learners are journalists who have interviewed a local celebrity. Telegraphic notes on the celebrity’s

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answers (prepared by the teacher) on index cards are distributed to groups of learners (see appendix). ‘Journalists’ are then told that the original list of questions used for the interview has been misplaced. In order to interpret their notes, they must collaborate and reconstruct the questions based on the index cards. The advantage of this activity is that it enables learners to move from answer to question in a way that is more authentic than requiring them to formulate questions, counter-intuitively, from unrelated, decontextualized ‘answers’.

I suggest further embedding the activity. Pre-task, learners work through an authentic question-answer interview such as can be found in popular magazines. This sensitizes them to the genre and provides written input. Post-task, learners collaborate to write the interview as a team. Different groups peer edit the work of others. All four skills are exploited, and an important formal feature is given lots of natural, contextualized practice.

3.1.3 Solution 2

Paired information-gap texts – where learners A and B are each missing information the other possesses – are found in many methods, including the New Headway series. I have had success with these.

Learner A: Van Gogh was born in ____ in 1853.Learner B: Van Gogh was born in Zundert in the year ____.

Advantages: (1) though not ‘real life’, the activity does replicate a situation in which a speaker is missing information; (2) such texts are easy to construct from scratch based on learners’ interests, age and level. They are easy to tie in with a skills-based (reading or listening) sequence.

3.2 Form

3.2.1 Problem

My learners, all native-speakers of French, have a lot to get their heads around, formally, when producing an IC. This is especially true when asking a wh-Q: front position of the interrogative constituent and subject-auxiliary inversion are often absent in spoken French (Coveney, 1989): Tu vas où? (= You’re going where?) / Où tu vas? (= Where you’re going?). These same learners find preposition stranding (impossible in French) unnatural and tend to avoid it. The result is forms that are often far from the target form, such as *Where you’re going?

3.2.2 Solution

I suggest progressively introducing, as fixed lexemes, high frequency chunks corresponding to the clause-initial, pre-verb-phrase string (= interrogative constituent + auxiliary- do/does/did + pronominal subject (‘you’)) of wh-Qs: what do you, where do you, when do you, etc. I would sensitize learners to the pronunciation and phonemic transcriptions (/wɒd j / – /ə ə weəd j / – /ə ə wend j /). After these ready-made frames,ə ə the content-heavy portion of the question is inserted (…think about that? …want to have dinner? …have English class?). A basic corpus study determines the order of importance in which these frames are introduced and practiced. (The fact that the string what do you

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is 20 times more frequent than who do you in the British National Corpus is not trivial.) This approach is radically different from the transformational approach most of us use.

3.3 Phonology

3.3.1 Problem

Although rising intonation for Y-NQs is a near linguistic universal (Cruttenden, 1997) and we might expect a lot of positive transfer, I find learners have problems with the intonation patterns associated with ICs. These patterns are not mere decoration – there is meaning attached. This brings Cowan (2008: 61) to insist that ‘the intonation pattern of every question type has to be covered in class’. Learners should understand, for example, that wh-Qs pronounced with an early intonation peak will be interpreted as echo questions expressing surprise or disbelief (Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, 1999).

3.3.2 Solution

Following a discrimination or listening task sensitizing learners to the two basic intonation patterns, this mingling activity puts learners into groups A and B. Each group A learner has a question prompt for either a Y-NQ (you / like reading) or a wh-Q (what / you do / last weekend). To each question corresponds a logical answer distributed to group B learners. Learners circulate and find their partner. Once paired up, group B learners answer the question only if the intonation pattern of learner A is correct. Receptively and productively, learners must pay attention to intonation. Once all pairs have been established, an open-class activity has each pair perform the mini-exchange; learners judge the appropriateness of the intonation patterns used. The activity can be repeated with new question-answer sets, with the roles of A and B reversed.

3.4 Meaning

3.4.1 Problem

Negative Y-NQs are never neutral. On the part of the asker, there is always an underlying expectation, the contradiction of which can be viewed negatively (Quirk et al., 1985): Can’t you help me next weekend? will thus often convey annoyance (Celce-Murcia, 1999) or impatience. Learners are not always aware of this.

Negative wh-Qs usually have neutral orientation, but not always: Why didn’t you tell me what happened? can be interpreted as an accusation. Simple input is not likely to highlight these communicative features; they need to be made salient to learners.

Speakers of Korean, Japanese and Hausa, finally, answer negative Y-NQs in their L1 in exactly the opposite way to speakers of English (Bevington 1979; Cowan, 2008): for these learners, an answer of ‘no’ to Don’t you want anything to eat? means ‘yes’ (= no, I don’t not want anything to eat). Opportunities for miscommunication abound.

3.4.2 Solution 1

Mastery of these more or less subtle features probably emerges late, especially in EFL contexts; corpus and examples and concept-checking questions, however, can be exploited to gradually sensitize learners to them. A few of the 420 BNC examples

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(adapted, if necessary) of ‘why didn’t you’ can be categorized by learners following some CCQs: Is this person annoyed? Impatient? Some of the examples, of course, will be neutral. Learners can choose an example and, with a partner, imagine a context before and after the utterance. I would not expect B1 learners to master these features productively, but passive recognition will no doubt prime them for later acquisition of them.

3.4.3 Solution 2

The idea (from Ur, 2009), particularly suited to (pre-)intermediate learners, is to sensitize them to answering Y-NQs while at the same time expanding their lexicon by introducing responses other than ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in their answer. The teacher first invites learners to ask him/her Y-NQs and avoids answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (Certainly. Of course not. I do. Probably. Possibly. Never. etc.) Learners then continue in teams, having prepared a set of Y-NQs. Someone from the opposite team must answer immediately. Lack of an answer, or an answer in yes or no, or the same answer as the previous team-member, eliminates that learner from the team. The competitive nature of the activity stimulates learners, and the language used is highly authentic: native speakers do not necessarily answer a Y-NQ with ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

4. Conclusion

The suggestions outlined above represent but a few of the ways we as teachers might approach ICs with our learners. My goal is to move away from the transformational approach my colleagues and I depend on too heavily in spite of the fact that it has failed to yield satisfactory results.

In the observed lesson that corresponds to this assignment, I intend to design a task-based lesson rather than rehash a PPP-type lesson. I will explore the chunking approaches advocated by the lexical approach with an eye not so much to demoting accuracy (which I am reluctant to sacrifice) as to promoting fluency. Concurrently, to cater for those learners at my home institution who, because of their learning style, are predisposed to wanting to ‘know the rule’, I will shift the burden of overt explanation to concise worksheets and exercises to study not during class time but pre- or post-lesson at home.

5. Bibliography

5.1 Research materials

Aarts, B. 2011. Oxford modern English grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bevington, G. 1979. ‘On being a negative ESL teacher’. TESOL Newsletter 13, 20-22.

Celce-Murcia, M. and Larsen-Freeman, D. 1999. The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher’s course. Second edition. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.

Coveney, Aidan. 1989. Variability in interrogation and negation in spoken French . Doctoral dissertation, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle, UK.

Cowan, R. 2008. The teacher’s grammar of English: A course book and reference guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cruttenden, A. 1997. Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Declerck, R. 1991. A comprehensive descriptive grammar of English. Tokyo: Kaitakusho.

Givón, T. 1993. English grammar: A function-based approach (vol. 2). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Lightbrown, P. and Spada, N. 2013. How languages are learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pienemann, M., Johnston, M. and Brindley, G. 1988. ‘Constructing an acquisition-based procedure for second language assessment’. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 10, 217-243.

Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.

5.2 Resource materials

Soars, L. and Soars, J. 2003. New Headway, intermediate student’s book. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (see pp. 151-152)

Soars, L. and Soars, J. 2007. New Headway, pre-intermediate student’s book. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (see pp. 143, 145, 146 and 148)

Ur, P. 2009. Grammar practice activities: A practical guide for teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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6. Appendices

Document 1Examples of index-card journalists’ questions (see section 3.1.2)

Documents 2 and 3Example of Solution 2 (see section 3.1.3) from New Headway, pre-intermediate

Documents 4 and 5Example of Solution 2 (see section 3.1.3) from New Headway, pre-intermediate

Documents 6 and 7Example of Solution 2 (see section 3.1.3) from New Headway, intermediate

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Document 1 (see section 3.1.2)

(N.B. The possible answers given in parentheses are examples only. Students are free to formulate ICs in whatever way they please, provided they correspond to the answer.)

At least once a week. There’s a UGC very close to where I live. (How often do you go to the cinema?)

Yes, but only a little. I have a friend I play tennis with – but I’m not very good.(Do you play any sports? / Do you like sports?)

No! Can you believe it? (laughter) But I met J. K. Rowling at a conference, and she’s very nice.(Have you read the Harry Potter books?)

Difficult question to answer! I spend lots of time at the local library, I read lots of books and take notes. You have to do this before you even start the first chapter.

(How do you prepare when you’re writing a book?)

For the moment, 9. The 10th one comes out next month.(How many books have you written?)

Absolutely! People love my rosemary roast chicken and potatoes! (rosemary = romarin)(Can you cook? / Do you like to cook?)

For the time being, no. But I have lots of nieces and nephews.(Do you have any children? / Have you got any children?)

Because children are great readers. They are loyal fans – much more than adults!(Why do you write books for children?)

In a month. But don’t ask me what it’s about – I won’t tell you!(When does your next book come out?)

When I was 13. It was a collection of short stories. I’ve never shown it to anyone!(When did you starting writing?)

A small village in the south of France. I spent my whole childhood there.(Where are you from? / Where were you born? / Where did you grow up?)

In Paris, of course! But it’s too expensive for me. Maybe someday when I’m rich and famous?(Where would you like to live?)

Autumn, I’d say. I love long walks in the countryside and looking at the beautiful colours.(What’s your favourite season? / Which season do you prefer?)

Flaubert, of course! I would have asked him so many questions about his writing techniques.(If you could meet an author who’s dead today, who would it be?)

Flaubert, Proust and Stendhal – my literary tastes are very traditional.(Who are your favourite authors?)

My mother. She continues to inspire me even today.(Who is your greatest inspiration?)

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