Concept Checking in EFL: What it is – How to do it

An area of mystery to many new or untrained teachers is the idea of concept checking.

Concept checking in EFL/ESL is simply the process of asking questions or providing simple activities that check your students’ understanding of a word, idea, a grammar structure or even an instruction you have given them.

Checking your students’ understanding of the material you have taught is critical to knowing if you have, in fact, completed your goal for a particular class.  Do you need to go back and teach it again?  Did they really get it?

Asking simply, “Do you understand?” doesn’t work.  What student wants to let all the other students know they don’t get it by raising their hand?  In many cultures students are no where near as assertive as those in Western countries and they will be loath to let you know they didn’t “get it”.

A few examples should clarify how concept checking in EFL works.

The most simple – to find out if students have understood your instructions for an activity or task, you can ask: “Do you know what to do right now?”  If no response, say “Do it” and look for stragglers . . .  Give more detail if more than one person appears to not know what to do.

To test a word/vocabulary concept – Example Sentence - Jimmy didn’t have enough time to study essay writing yesterday.

You can ask numerous questions about this sentence depending on what you are teaching, but you might ask the following:

Does essay writing take a lot of time?  Was Jimmy busy yesterday?

Another example – Until today, Jimmy didn’t understand how to do a quadratic equation.

You might ask:  When did Jimmy learn to do a quadratic equation?  Or . . . Did Jimmy know how to do a quadratic equation yesterday?

For a grammar concept, let’s try something simple like present perfect.

I have been running a business since I was 16.

You can ask:  Was this person running a business yesterday? (assuming she wasn’t 15 yesterday!)

Is this person running a business today?

Be aware that yes/no type questions can mislead you as students might guess and get it right and not truly know.  If you use yes/no questions for concept checking, it is good to ask more than one question of more than one student – just to be sure.

This kind of frequent Q & A can help make your classroom more interactive and draw your students into the lesson.  It will also help you know if you need to give more detail, do more review, initiate more practice or if the students have it down pat.

source:http://www.teflteachertraining.com/blog/concept-checking-in-efl-what-it-is-and-how-to-do-it/