Keep Calm and Teach English

Developing reading comprehension in the EFL classroom requires much more than vocabulary practice or grammar explanations. To help learners truly understand a text, teachers need strategies that promote deeper thinking, engagement, and meaningful language use. One highly effective framework is the Four Levels of Questioning—Robot, Detective, Judge, and Inventor. Although not part of Bloom’s Taxonomy, these four levels align closely with Bloom’s hierarchy of cognitive skills, making them a practical tool for EFL teachers who want to build higher-order thinking skills while strengthening English proficiency. Robot questions form the foundation. These basic recall questions—Who? What? When? Where?—support the Remembering and Understanding stages of Bloom’s Taxonomy. For English learners, this stage ensures comprehension of essential information and key vocabulary before moving on to more complex tasks. This makes Robot questions ideal for early stages of reading comprehension activities....

Twenty Questions is one of those "go to" games that require no preparation and can be used as a timesaver when the lesson finishes earlier than expected, as a student reward or even when you are too tired or ill to continue, (because let's be honest, teachers can have "one of those days"....). photo by  Karinamannott A fun alternative to the game is  Akinator, the Web Genie . Akinator is an internet game and mobile app based on 20 questions that can guess which character the player is thinking of by asking them a series of questions. It is  an atificial intelligence program that can "learn" the best questions to ask you.  What is interesting about the Akinator is that the more you challenge him the bigger his database becomes.  With Akinator students can have the chance to see questions modelled for them before they actually try to ask their own - asking questions is not as easy as it sounds for language learners especially in lower lev...

Question words are used to ask about specific qualities, times, places, people, etc. They are different from yes / no questions.  The most common question words in English are the following:  (image from the  language learning base )