In this post, we’re going to concentrate on the first point – checking understanding of instructions.

words, grammatical structures, functional chunks. Their understanding of our instructions.There are two basic areas in which we may want to check students’ understanding. So…it can be helpful to have techniques in the classroom that help us to quickly and effectively check students’ understanding. Or maybe they say they do and then subsequently you discover that they didn’t and have to backtrack. But do they? And how do you know? Maybe they do, but you as a teacher are not convinced and so you waste time re-clarifying something. Sometimes, especially if students have learnt a particular structure before, or think the activity you are instructing is one they have done before, they may feel that they do understand it. Meanwhile, the teacher thinks ‘Hurray! I’m doing great!’.

For this reason, it may be that students don’t tell us they didn’t understand to avoid feeling stupid or avoid drawing attention to themselves. How might you feel about saying ‘No I don’t understand’ in front of everyone? For a lot of people, and in a lot of cultures, publicly admitting you didn’t understand or couldn’t follow something is very uncomfortable. Everybody else answers with a clear ‘Yes!’. Imagine you are a student and the teacher has just asked the class if they understand. Why is ‘Do you understand?’ often not a very helpful question? 1. However, in the ESL classroom, and on CELTAs, you will most likely be discouraged from asking these questions. If they say they did, we are generally satisfied and move on to the next part of the conversation, and if they say they didn’t, we would usually try to re-explain and then ask again if they are clear. For the most part, people will tell us that they did or they didn’t. In our everyday life outside the classroom, when we want to check if we have been understood, the most straightforward thing to do is simply ask ’Do you understand?’, or ‘Do you know what I mean?’.

What is icq and ccq