Asking Questions

Questioning is an activation technique universally used in teaching, mainly within the IRF pattern.

In class it is possible to ask many different kinds of questions, and to ask questions in many different ways. The T's questions are not always realised by interrogatives; for example, the question: "What can you see in this picture?" may be expressed by the statement: "We'll describe what is going on in this picture", or by the command: "Tell me / Describe what is going on in this picture."

So, in the context of teaching, a question may be best defined as a teacher utterance which has the objective of eliciting an oral response from the learners.