Referential Questions

Questions where the teacher does not know the answer at the time of asking. The purpose is to seek genuine information, opinions, or experiences from learners — creating authentic communication in the classroom. The term was introduced by Long and Sato (1983) alongside display questions to describe two fundamentally different types of teacher questioning in L2 classrooms.

Examples:

• "What did you do last weekend?"
• "Do you think cities are better places to live than the countryside? Why?"
• "What was the most interesting thing you read recently?"
• "How would you solve this problem?"

In each case, the teacher does not know what the student will say. The question creates a genuine information gap.

Why They Matter

Referential questions are the backbone of communicative language teaching. They matter because:

They Generate More Language

Brock (1986) conducted the landmark experimental study: four ESL teachers taught the same lesson, but two were trained to incorporate more referential questions. The results were striking — students in the referential-question classes produced:

• Significantly longer responses — not one-word or one-phrase answers, but extended utterances
• More syntactically complex language — subordinate clauses, connectives, hedging
• More content — opinions, justifications, narratives, not just factual recall

Subsequent studies have consistently replicated these findings. Referential questions generate approximately three times as much student output as display questions (Brock, 1986; Nunan, 1987).

They Create Authentic Discourse

In natural conversation, almost all questions are referential. We ask people things because we want to know. Classrooms dominated by display questions create an artificial discourse pattern (IRF/IRE) that bears little resemblance to real communication. Referential questions restore the fundamental conversational dynamic: one person asks because they genuinely want to know what the other thinks.

They Promote Higher-Order Thinking

Display questions typically target recall and recognition. Referential questions can target analysis, evaluation, and creation — the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy. "Why do you think the author chose that ending?" demands more cognitive processing than "What happened at the end of the story?"

They Build Learner Identity

When teachers ask genuine questions about learners' lives, opinions, and experiences, they communicate that students' ideas matter. This has affective benefits — increased motivation, stronger rapport, greater willingness to participate — that go beyond language output metrics.

The Long and Sato (1983) Finding

Long and Sato's original study compared the question types used by ESL teachers in classrooms with those used by native speakers in conversations with non-native speakers outside classrooms. The finding was dramatic: in natural conversation, referential questions vastly outnumbered display questions. In classrooms, the pattern was reversed — teachers asked far more display questions. This suggested that classroom discourse was fundamentally different from the natural communicative interaction it was supposed to be preparing learners for.

This finding became one of the key arguments for the communicative approach: if we want classrooms to develop communicative competence, classroom interaction must more closely resemble genuine communication.

Practical Challenges

Referential questions are harder to use than display questions, for real reasons:

1. Unpredictable answers — the teacher cannot script the response, which makes classroom management harder and requires greater language awareness and flexibility.
2. Longer wait time needed — students need more time to formulate genuine answers than to recall known facts. Teachers must resist the urge to fill the silence.
3. Error management — longer, more complex answers contain more errors. The teacher must decide in real time what to correct and what to let pass — a judgment that varies by lesson aim.
4. Lower-level learners — genuine questions may exceed the productive capacity of beginners. A question like "What do you think about globalisation?" requires vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatic competence that A1 learners do not have.
5. Cultural expectations — in some educational cultures, students expect (and are comfortable with) teacher-controlled, display-question-dominated interaction. Shifting to referential questions may initially create discomfort.

Techniques for Incorporating Referential Questions

• Personalisation — the simplest referential technique: after teaching new language, ask students to use it to talk about their own lives. "We've practised past simple. Now tell your partner about your last holiday."
• Opinion questions — "What do you think about...?" requires genuine thought and produces varied responses.
• Follow-up questions — after a student answers a display question correctly, follow up with a referential one. "Good, 'reluctant' means unwilling. Can you think of a time you felt reluctant to do something?"
• Problem-solving tasks — inherently referential, since there is no single correct answer the teacher holds.
• Discussion and debate — structured discussions with referential prompts generate sustained communication.

Display and Referential: Not a Binary

The distinction is not always clean. Some questions sit in between:

• "What do you think the answer is?" — the teacher may know the answer but is inviting the student to reason toward it (quasi-referential).
• "What would you do in this situation?" — referential in form, but if asked about a textbook character, it may feel like a comprehension check.

The value of the distinction is not as a rigid classification but as a diagnostic lens: if a teacher records a lesson and finds 90% display questions, there is an imbalance that limits communicative opportunities.

Key References

• Long, M. H., & Sato, C. J. (1983). Classroom foreigner talk discourse: Forms and functions of teachers' questions. In H. W. Seliger & M. H. Long (Eds.), Classroom oriented research in second language acquisition (pp. 268–285). Newbury House.
• Brock, C. A. (1986). The effects of referential questions on ESL classroom discourse. TESOL Quarterly, 20(1), 47–59.
• Nunan, D. (1987). Communicative language teaching: Making it work. ELT Journal, 41(2), 136–145.
• Thornbury, S. (2006). An A–Z of ELT. Macmillan.
• Lynch, T. (1991). Questioning roles in the classroom. ELT Journal, 45(3), 201–210.