Do you know how to ask questions in English correctly?
Let's check this video out to learn more about it.
Asking questions is one of the most crucial skills in a language.
It is not only essential in your daily conversation with native speakers.
It is also of paramount importance as you begin your research project.
Because right at the start of your research project,
you'll be asking your research questions,
not to mention your need to ask questions in your questionnaire
to collect data for your research.
So, let's briefly revisit the grammar you'll need to ask questions correctly in English.
While second language learners might sometimes feel confused about asking questions in English,
English questions are indeed fairly consistent and follow a clear structure.
There are four main parts that you need to keep in mind.
They are question-word or question-phrase, auxiliary verb or helping verb, subject and main verb.
These are the four elements you need and you need them in this order every time.
Here are some examples.
Where do you live?
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In this question, we don't have a question-word,
but we do have all the other parts of the English question structure.
As you see, question-words or question-phrases are not always necessary.
Sometimes you start a question without a question-word, but simply with an auxiliary verb.
This type of question is a closed-ended question.
The answers to this type of questions are rather limited, either yes or no.
The other two questions you saw earlier are open-ended questions.
For this type of questions, you need to start them with a question-word or a question-phrase.
The answers to these questions can be anything.
Both of these question types are important and can be asked as your research questions
and as your tool to collect data from your questionnaire respondents.
To form your questions correctly, you need to make sure your subject and your auxiliary verb match.
When you are using an auxiliary verb in English questions and in regular sentences too,
your main verb stays in the infinitive form and your auxiliary verb changes,
depending on the subject and the tense.
For example, do you live in the hostel?
The auxiliary verb matches the subject.
If the subject changes to your best friend, then we need to change the auxiliary verb to match it.
Besides asking closed-ended and open-ended questions, there are two other types of questions that you might be asking.
They are subject questions and object questions.
Let's look at these two questions. How are they different?
The first question is a familiar structure. It has all the four elements we just discussed.
However, in the second question, the auxiliary verb is missing.
How can this be? Is there anything wrong?
Questions are what we ask to get more information.
Most commonly, we ask about the object to get extra information.
We already know the subject, we know the action, and we just want the extra details.
For example, we know you made a phone call because we saw you do it,
but we don't know who you talked to because we could not hear the other side of the phone.
So we want to know about it.
Paul is the answer and that is the object of that sentence.
In this case, you're asking an object question.
Sometimes, however, we ask questions because we don't know the subject.
We don't know who or what did the concerned action or what the main idea is.
For example, we heard somebody call you, but we don't know who he or she was.
When we need to know this information, we ask a subject question.
Subject questions are also very common questions,
but we can only use the question words who and what with subject questions.
When you ask subject questions, you don't use the auxiliary verb,
and because of this reason, the verb needs to be conjugated to match the time tense.
However, please do remember that you need to use auxiliary verb with object questions.
There are other types of questions in English, and each of them has different patterns.
If you start paying attention to the detail, you'll really be able to improve your grammar.
Today, we have covered the correct ways to form open-ended and closed-ended questions,
and we have learned that there are four key elements in these English questions.
We've also looked at the differences between subject and object questions.
Hope you'll remember all of them well.
Practice makes perfect.
Let's do some exercises now to check your understanding and consolidate your learning.