"How much do you weigh?" ... "What color is your hair really?"
"How much income tax did you pay last year?" ... "Who are you voting for?"
"What makes you ask?" ... "Mind your own business!"
"I don't remember." ... "Wouldn't you like to know?"
What's the best way to respond to students who persist in asking personal questions? David Maisel, an ESL teacher from Boston, Massachusetts, USA, has written a helpful guide for teachers which lists personal questions that students are likely to ask, and stock replies that teachers can use to put them off the scent, ranging from polite to downright rude!
You can download the 87 page .rtf file for free here:
Personal Questions & Stock Replies to Personal Questions
(.rtf file, 793KB)
We asked David a few questions about his project:
English Banana: What is your resource?
David Maisel: It's a list of 750 common questions that often feel intrusive and 1,000 conventional responses to such questions. The file includes formats of ESL exercises for teaching such exchanges and a list of the pragmatic factors that differentiate the stock replies.
EB: Why should ESL teachers download it?
DM: There are territories where trespassers are given an explicit warning. In other places they are met with baseball bats or shot at. Once in a while they are offered directions and coffee. For an English speaker who has been asked an intrusive personal question, the calibration of the increments along that spectrum (to let the intruder instantly recognize any increment's attitude toward the intrusion) is managed by over a thousand stock replies.
If someone from Mars wanted to find out what made Earthlings (or, at least, contemporary Americans) fidget or blush, the list of 750 intrusive questions would serve as a quick sketch.
EB: What is the best way of dealing with the problem of intrusive personal questions from students?
DM: For an ESL teacher who has been asked an unwelcome personal question by a student who might not recognize the point of a stock reply that doesn't answer the question, some effective and safe responses are to change the subject, look away or stare back in silence. These three responses work also when the responder and the asker are native speakers of the same language. They've worked on me.
EB: Tell us more about yourself and what you do.
DM: I'm an ESL teacher in Boston, Massachusetts. To prod shy students to approach native speakers of English for conversation, I assign interviewing tasks with questionnaires that aim to keep the native-speaking stranger interested enough to continue for 15 minutes. To teach syntax, intonation and communicative functions, I have collaborated with trained singers to record audio ESL roleplays and other dialogs whose accompanying exercises give a few semesters' worth of written homework.
EB: Thanks for sharing your ESL resource with us!
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