Silva, Elisabete Mendes2017-01-162017-01-162015Silva, Elisabete Mendes (2015). Concept questions: an effective way of checking understanding of meaning. I Colóquio Internacional de Línguas Estrangeiras: de uma língua a outra. Bragançahttp://hdl.handle.net/10198/13793When teaching English as a foreign language it is quite recurrent to ask the following question: ‘Do you understand?’ in order to get feedback on grammar issues or vocabulary comprehension, for example. The most common answer to this question is, most of the times, ‘yes’ which is obviously quite uninformative. Normally, students answer ‘yes’ because they don’t want to look unwise or because they think they understand. However, this very traditional technique is not effective when it comes to understanding the meaning of language items students are learning. We believe concept questions do the trick here. Albeit concept questions are not new, they are still unknown to many teachers. Therefore, this workshop’s main aim is to introduce concept questions as the most effective method of checking understanding of vocabulary items and of more complicated language or grammatical structures. Even though they also require ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers, the key point is to avoid the ‘do you understand?’ question.engConcept questionsTeaching foreign languagesChecking meaningconference object