How can you develop your students’ thinking skills? Rosie Tanner and Liz Dale have an activity that might help, taken from their book, CLIL Activities.
| Outline: Learners change ‘skinny’ questions into ‘fat’ questions. Level: B1 and above Age: Any Time: 30 minutes Language focus: Questions Language skills: Reading and writing Thinking skills: Comparing and contrasting, reasoning, creative thinking, evaluating Preparation: Skinny questions usually require factual, short answers; fat questions help learners to think more and use more language than skinny ones, so they are great for CLIL. Choose a text with skinny questions or write five skinny questions to accompany the text. |
Procedure
1. Draw a ‘skinny’ question mark on the board, and ask learners a subject question which requires a short, factual answer (e.g. geography: What is the average temperature in summer in your country? ).
2. Draw a ‘fat’ question mark on the board, and ask learners a subject question which requires a longer answer, and makes them think (e.g. geography: How does the average temperature change during a typical year in your country?). Discuss the difference between the two questions with your class, and introduce the terms skinny and fat questions .
3. Put learners into pairs and hand out the text and skinny questions. Ask the learners to change each skinny question into a fat question. They should also write their own model answers for each fat question on a different piece of paper. The answers to the questions might be found in the text, or between the lines.
4. Form groups of four from two pairs. The pairs give their fat questions to each other, keeping the answers to themselves. They answer each other’s fat questions.
5. The pairs give their answers to each other and discuss any differences between their answers.
6. Ask each group to choose the best question (i.e. the question that really made them think and use lots of language in their answer). Share and discuss these together.
Skinny questions (lower-order thinking skills, short answers) |
Fat questions (higher-order thinking skills, longer answers) |
| What happened when I added the acid? | Can you explain the shape of the graph? |
| What is electricity? | How could we use our work on electricity to design a winter lighting system for a greenhouse? |
| What is the greenhouse effect? | How might the greenhouse effect affect the lives of your children and grandchildren? |
| Give me 10 different words starting with in- . | What do you think the prefix in- means? How many other prefixes can you think of which mean the same? |
| Have you read Chapter 8? | What is your opinion of Chapter 8? |
| What did David Livingstone discover? | How do you think David Livingstone’s early life affected his career? Describe a day in the life of David Livingstone in Africa. |
Subject examples
Most texts can be used for this activity.
Follow-up
Learners write their own fat questions about a different text.
Tips for cross-curricular cooperation between subject and language teachers
- Before the lesson: The language teacher practises question forms with the learners.
- After the lesson: The language teacher gives feedback on common mistakes made in formulating questions.