Concept Checking Questions (CCQs) are undoubtedly a term familiar to any teacher who has completed a TEFL training course. We ask CCQs to make sure our students have fully understood a lesson's target language, so that they won't fossilise erroneous assumptions which may later contribute to all sorts of errors (e.g. interpretative, strategic, stylistic, etc.) in their language production.
I believe, however, CCQs aren't limited to the domain of EFL teachers. Our students can make good use of them too.
I was tapping into my personal experience of learning German noun, adjective and article endings. Like many German learners who use English as the referential anchor, I always joked we had it much simpler than the 'infinite' number of German cases and endings. Nevertheless, it is my German teacher, Beate, who I have to thank for helping me attain mastery of this system. (I'm still making loads of mistakes because of noun gender, but that's another story.) She explained how it works by giving me four self-checking questions.
For those of you interested in the self-checking questions, here they are:
1. What gender is the singular/plural noun?
2. Is there an article in the sentence? (Do we need one?)
3. If there is an article, does it already carry the gender ending?
4. What case is the object noun in the sentence?
Gestern habe ich ein blaues Fahrrad gekauft. [I bought a blue bicycle yesterday.]
1. Fahrrad is a neutral noun. It is singular in this sentence.
2. We need an article because Fahrrad is singular countable.
3. The indefinite article ein is not inflected; it can signal either the masculine or neutral gender.
4. Fahrrad is in the akkusativ, not dativ, case because of the verb gekauft. The indefinite article ein is sufficient (eines is in the genetive case), but we have the adjective blaues, which carries the -es netural gender ending.
After using these self-checking questions for a gazillion times, I have internalised the entire system to the point of reducing my formulation ('thinking') time down to less than a mere second! In other words, it has become an automatised process for me in speaking and writing.
If we transfer the above learning experience to the English language, teachers may be able to go a step further by giving their students self-checking questions where appropriate. In turn, the students can ask such questions outside the classroom, which would enable them to move closer towards internalising the use of a target language. To this end, collaborative 'guided discovery' tasks with checking questions (CCQs) are a great teaching tool.