On 11 March, at the Valletta Design Cluster, Church School teachers of French, led by their Head of Department at the Secretariat for Catholic Education, Ms Prascovia Deidun, followed Continuous Professional Development training involving two interventions by UM academics. Dr Anne-Marie Bezzina Busuttil, Head of the Department of French at the Faculty of Arts, gave a corpus-based presentation explaining how teachers’ questioning strategies influence or even pre-define learner responses in whole-class foreign language interactional exchanges, leading to suggestions for effective foreign language classroom elicitation.
This fed into a workshop on questioning strategies, prepared and coordinated by Ms Anna Scicluna, Coordinator of the French subject area within the Department of Languages and Humanities of the Faculty of Education. In this workshop, Ms Scicluna illustrated model practice and stimulated participant teachers to balance and correctly sequence display and referential questions, also by using probing questions that induce learners to produce longer, more elaborate and more cognitively demanding utterances.
