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How to teach WH questions


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My child is currently at first grade in public school. He is a bilingual child and starts receiving ESL from K as teacher found that he was lack of understanding of abstract vocabulary. It's hard for him to express his feeling clearly at that time. This year, his ESL teacher said that he probably will exit the program after first grade as his oral and listening English ability is almost like native speaker. He will need to catch up a little bit on reading and writing but they do not concern at this point as most of children at this age are still learning reading and writing. However, yesterday his social skill teacher (we use private practice and he does not have any diagnose) mentioned that she observed my son and found he often has difficulty to understand the WH questions when having conversation.

Example:

she asked him "what are you going to do on thanksgiving?"

He said "happy thanksgiving".

When a boy from the group asked him "where did you go on the weekend?"

He answered "I went camping".

For Yes-No questions, he has no problem.

 

I tried it myself yesterday on the way home. I asked him "where did you go last weekend?" He was stuck and could not give me an answer. Then I narrowed down the question to "where did you go last Saturday?" Then he was able to give me the answer correctly.

 

His social skills teacher concerns about this issue as it will impact his friendship development. Other children may feel frustrated when he does not answer their question correctly. Is there any book or DVD out there addressing this kind of issue? Or how I can help him on this? His social skills teacher wants me to address it with ESL teacher at school, but ESL teacher seems not concerned as she thinks his social English is already at the top level according per their assessment.

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You mention he is bilingual. Can he respond to this type of questions correctly in his native language, or does he have difficulties understanding the concept "where"?

 

 

He is Chinese and English bilingual but he does not really speak much Chinese now. So far I do not see issue of understanding concept of "where" in his Chinese. However, the wording and sentence sturcture in Chinese is completely different from English. Therefore, it's hard to compare.

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Superduper.com has games for teaching children how to answer WH questions correctly. We worked on one WH question at a time til my child responded 8 out of 10 times correctly. It was a fun way to learn and practice the skill.

 

 

Thanks. I ordered the CD Rom and can't wait to try it.

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