What are embedded questions and why is it important to learn them?

An embedded question is a question within a question or a statement. It usually appears when one asks a question to show passiveness or politeness. It also appears in situations where one inquires about certain information indirectly or when a question is asked in reported speech.

Embedded questions are noun phrases, meaning that they are in regular word order. The noun clause word order is simply subject + verb, and the noun clause is the object of a verb.(Williams, 2014) For embedded questions, the noun clause should start with a question word (what, when, where, which, how, why). For example, from the question “Can you tell me where Paris is located?”, “where Paris is located” is a noun clause, and it is the object of the verb “tell”. While in questions that require a yes or no response, the noun clause should begin with “if” or “whether”. For example, in the question “Do you know if Henry still exists?”, “if Henry still exists” is a noun clause, it is also the object of the verb “know”.

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Evaluation of Traditional Teaching Methods

One of the most common errors in delivering embedded questions is putting a question as its original structure into another question. For example, “Do you have any idea where is my shirt?” From this example, we can see two questions in one sentence: “Do you have any idea?” “Where is my shirt?” when the correct way to ask this question is by saying “Do you have any idea where my shirt is?”.

The second error would be the composition of an embedded question asking for a yes or no response. For instance, “Can you tell me if it is true that David cheated on Sarah?” would usually be mistakenly structured as “Can you tell me is it true that David cheated on Sarah?” where the speaker falsely inserted two questions in one sentence with only one question mark.

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Our Review

We aim to find out why and how our subjects of investigation make mistakes in forming embedded questions in the right syntactic structure, and we hope to explore ways of teaching them to correctly utilize embedded questions.

There are not any syllabi about embedded questions in local schools, but reported speech instead. In our opinion, they are of a similar nature perhaps that is the reason why most schools neglect the importance of teaching embedded questions.

Also, English teachers in local schools are not usually native speakers (L2), they also make mistakes when delivering embedded questions and that the errors made by the teachers are due to L1 transfer (Cowan, 2008), meaning that their composition of certain sentence structures is based on their mother tongue. In Chinese, there is no such thing as embedded questions. Even the question is asked in the same way in its dialect when they put two questions in one question. This shows the root cause of errors made in forming embedded questions.

To eliminate the errors of delivering embedded questions, we have come up with three methods which you could find it in the Creative Approaches.

• 1. Sentence restructuring (a game of forming sentences in the right order)
• 2. Embedded question drill (activity of changing direct questions into embedded/indirect questions using color coded cards)
• 3. Role-playing (3 students in a group to demonstrate)