During my time as a university lecturer I would preface all my course outlines and begin some classes with the assertion: There is no such thing as a stupid question, but there may be such a thing as a stupid silence. This was due in part to the fact that I had many students from Asian cultures where respect for the teacher may show as a reluctance to interrupt and ask for help or explanation. I wanted to put over the message that failing to ask me when clarity was needed was much worse than asking, and that the questioner, far from looking stupid, would often win the gratitude of others in the group who also wanted to know but had been too timid to raise their hands. I suppose that strictly I should have limited my comment to There is no such thing as a stupid inquiry, which the following piece that I published in the Language Close-Up column of ELT Journal in Spring 1983 will explain.
There is an ambiguity about the word question in that it
can describe either a grammatical form or a discourse function. As a
grammatical term its markers are familiar. A question is something that in
writing ends with a question mark, in speech has certain intonation
patterns associated with it, and syntactically usually has particular word
order. But a grammatical question can serve many functions. It can be a
request:
Could you lend me a hand?
It can be an offer:
Would you like a cup of tea?
It can be a warning:
Do you know there’s a strong current here?
Or it can be a threat:
Do you want a punch on the nose?
A test for a function is how it can be paraphrased. These four examples
can properly be paraphrased as follows:
I am requesting your help.
I am offering you a cup of tea.
I am warning you about the dangerous current.
I am threatening you with a punch on the nose.
If we eliminate examples like these we are left with a hard core of
questions which can only be paraphrased with sentences beginning “I
want to know” However, these real questions are not functionally
uniform, and I would like to suggest a further classification and a set of
terms to identify the classes. Using the right terms can help to remind us
just what work the various kinds of question are doing. The three terms
that I am proposing are inquiry, query and
quiz.
Under inquiry I would include all questions asked because
the questioner needs the information in the answer. You make an inquiry to
find out the way, the time, the price, the meaning of something not
understood, or any other piece of needed information. There are several
felicity conditions surrounding such question and answer sequences in real
life. The responder expects the answer to be listened to and acknowledged.
Inquiries are normally three move exchanges, consisting of question,
answer and thanks. Another point is that the questioner may expect the
responder to know the answer but cannot be certain of it. “I
don’t know” may not be a welcome answer but it is a perfectly
legitimate one. Similarly questioners expects responders to give the
answer if they know it. A sequence like:
What’s the time?
I know, but I’m not telling you.
has an extremely childish ring and would sound very odd between adults. An
adult who, for whatever reason, was unwilling to answer would almost
certainly tell a lie and say “I don’t know” or “My
watch has stopped.”
A query, on the other hand, is a question to which the
answer is not important. It can be a phatic question asked just to sustain
a social dialogue, like “How are you?” Or it can be a
rhetorical question in monologue, like “Where would Britain be
without the railways?” In either case the responder is not doing the
questioner a favour by answering, so the exchange can be completed in two
moves or even one.
A quiz is a question asked to find out what the responder
knows. It is not asked because the questioner needs to know, and the
responder will probably not be thanked for the answer. What will happen
instead is that the questioner will give a judgement, “That’s
right” or “I don’t think so”, or may just keep
silent, leaving the responder to judge whether the answer was acceptable
or unacceptable. A quiz may serve as the introductory move in a piece of
wordplay, a riddle or a joke or a bet. Apart from that it is rare in
conversation between adults of equal status, but very common between
adults and children or among children. It is, of course, one of the main
components of the instructional situation. All teachers ask quizzes often.
There is, though, a particular danger facing language teachers, namely that they may think, if they give their students practice in answering, and perhaps asking, quizzes, that they have equipped them to deal with all forms of questions. Language learners, however, may need more exposure than they get to discourse situations where you thank a person for an answer and where “I don’t know” may be the correct answer rather than a shameful confession of failure. Distinguishing between inquiries, queries and quizzes in our own minds may help us to avoid this danger.