Instruction Checking Questions: 12 Best ESL Examples

Instruction checking questions are the cheapest insurance policy in ESL teaching. You spend ninety seconds writing them in the margin of your lesson plan and you save five minutes of classroom chaos when twelve students start the wrong activity. Most teachers who skip ICQs aren’t saving prep time — they’re spending it later, walking from table to table re-explaining the task they thought they’d already explained.

This guide covers what instruction checking questions are, when they matter, twelve worked examples you can lift straight into Monday’s lesson, and the small mistakes that quietly make them useless. The examples cover pair work, jigsaw reading, gap fills, role plays, and a few situations CELTA trainees almost never get drilled on.

What Are Instruction Checking Questions (ICQs)?

An instruction checking question is a short, closed question asked after you’ve given task instructions but before students start the activity. The job is narrow: confirm that learners know what to do, where to look, how long they have, and who they’re working with. Nothing else.

The questions are not designed to test language. They’re a procedural sanity check. “Are you writing or speaking?” “Do you work alone or with a partner?” “How many minutes?” The answers should be one or two words. If a student needs a full sentence to answer, the ICQ is doing the wrong job.

That narrowness is the whole point. A student who genuinely missed the instructions can recover in two seconds without losing face. The classroom doesn’t grind to a halt while you ask “any questions?” and get back a wall of polite silence — which is what happens in most rooms, especially in East Asian classrooms where admitting confusion in public costs status.

ICQ vs CCQ: The Distinction That Trips Up CELTA Candidates

This is the single most-missed point on early CELTA observed lessons. Trainees use the labels interchangeably and the tutor circles both terms in red on the feedback form. They are not the same tool.

A concept checking question (CCQ) probes whether students understand the meaning of a piece of target language. If you’ve just taught “used to,” a CCQ might be “Do I drink coffee now? Did I drink coffee before?” The goal is to confirm the concept landed.

An ICQ checks whether students understand the task. After setting up a controlled practice on “used to,” your ICQ is “Are you writing sentences or speaking? Are you working alone or with your partner?” One tool checks the language. The other checks the procedure. Mix them up and you’ll waste class time confirming things you already know.

Watch: A Clear Walkthrough of ICQs in Practice

Jo Gakonga’s overview is the cleanest video summary of how ICQs sit inside a CELTA lesson stage, and it pairs well with the written examples below.

When ICQs Are Actually Worth Asking

Not every instruction needs an ICQ. The honest truth is that asking “Are you reading or writing?” before every single task turns into white noise. Students stop listening to your checks the way they stopped listening to your original instructions, and you’ve just doubled the dead air.

ICQs earn their keep when at least one of these is true: the task has two or more steps, the seating or grouping is non-default (jigsaw, mingle, inner-outer circle), the activity has a time limit that matters, or the language demands of the instruction are higher than the language demands of the task itself. The last one matters most with low-level learners — if your instruction is harder to understand than the gap fill, you’ve staged the lesson backwards.

The five-second test: before asking the ICQ, predict the answer you expect. If every student would obviously get it right, drop the ICQ. If you genuinely don’t know whether half the class is about to start the wrong activity, ask it.

The Setup Sequence That Makes ICQs Work

An ICQ inside a sloppy instruction sequence is decoration. The instruction itself needs to be staged or the check has nothing to verify.

The sequence that works in almost every room: get attention first, then demonstrate the task with one student or yourself, then give the verbal instruction in short chunks, then hand out materials, then ask the ICQs, then say “begin.” Handing out the worksheet before the instruction is the classic rookie move — every student immediately looks down at the paper and the rest of your instructions hit the back of their heads. Materials last, always.

12 Instruction Checking Questions ESL Teachers Can Steal

Each example below is paired with the task it follows. Copy the script, change the verb to fit your activity, and move on. These cover the lesson stages where confusion is most likely to cost you minutes.

1. Controlled Pair Practice (Gap Fill)

Task: students complete a gap-fill in pairs.

• Are you writing or speaking? Writing.
• Alone or with your partner? With my partner.
• How many minutes? Five.

2. Jigsaw Reading

Task: Group A reads Text 1, Group B reads Text 2, then pairs swap information.

• Do you read the same text or a different text? Different.
• Can you show your partner the paper? No.
• What do you do after you finish reading? Tell my partner.

3. Mingle Activity (Find Someone Who)

Task: students walk around the room asking yes/no questions.

• Do you sit or stand? Stand.
• Do you talk to one person or many people? Many.
• Do you write your own answer or your classmates’ answers? Classmates’.

4. Role Play (Restaurant Scenario)

Task: Student A is the customer, Student B is the waiter.

• Who is the waiter? Student B.
• Do you use the menu? Yes.
• How long do you talk? Three minutes.

For the full set of conversation prompts and scenarios that pair well with role play ICQs, see this list of ESL role play activities.

5. Listening for Specific Information

Task: students hear an audio clip and circle three details on a form.

• How many times do you listen? Twice.
• Do you write a full sentence or circle the answer? Circle.
• Do you compare with your partner before or after? After.

6. Inner-Outer Circle Speaking

Task: students sit in two concentric rings and ask each other questions, then the outer ring rotates.

• Does the inside circle move or the outside circle move? Outside.
• When you change partner, do you ask the same question or a new question? Same.
• Do you stop when I clap or when I say “stop”? When you clap.

7. Vocabulary Matching

Task: students match words to definitions on a worksheet.

• Do you write the word or draw a line? Draw a line.
• How many words? Ten.
• Can you use your dictionary? No.

8. Running Dictation

Task: one student reads a text on the wall and dictates to a partner who writes.

• Who runs — the reader or the writer? The reader.
• Can the writer leave the chair? No.
• Do you change roles in the middle? Yes.

9. Felkorrigeringsauktion

Task: pairs decide which sentences contain errors and “bid” to correct them.

• Do you correct every sentence? No.
• If a sentence has no error, what do you do? Leave it.
• Do you correct alone or with your partner? With my partner.

10. Picture Description (Information Gap)

Task: Student A describes a picture, Student B draws what they hear.

• Can Student B see the picture? No.
• Can Student B ask questions? Yes.
• What does Student B do with the paper? Draw.

11. Sentence Reordering

Task: students put cut-up words in order to form correct sentences.

• How many sentences do you make? Five.
• Do you use every word? Yes.
• Do you stand up when you finish? Yes.

12. Homework Setting

Task: students write a short paragraph using three target structures by next class.

• How many words? About one hundred.
• How many structures must you use? Three.
• When is it due? Wednesday.

The Five Mistakes That Make ICQs Useless

The reason your ICQs fall flat is almost always one of these. Fix them and the same questions start saving you time instead of wasting it.

Asking “Do you understand?” This is not an ICQ. Every student will say yes regardless of whether they understood. It checks nothing. The British Council’s teacher guidance on giving instructions hammers this point — yes/no understanding checks return false confidence, not real information.

Asking open questions. “What are you going to do?” forces students to produce a full sentence in English, which is often harder than the task itself and gives slower learners a stage to fail on. Keep ICQs closed and answerable in one or two words.

Asking ICQs in the wrong language register. Pre-intermediate students will not understand “Are you working collaboratively or individually?” If the ICQ uses more difficult language than the task, redesign the ICQ in shorter words. “Together or alone?” is a perfectly serious question.

Nominating only the strong students. If the same three students answer every ICQ, you’ve confirmed those three are fine and learned nothing about the other seventeen. Vary who you call on, and especially nominate the quiet learners — they’re the ones an ICQ exists to protect.

Skipping the demo. An ICQ verifies that students processed your instruction. If they had nothing to process — no verbal walk-through, no example on the board — the ICQ has nothing to check and devolves into guessing.

Adapting ICQs for Young Learners

With kids under twelve, the principle stays the same but the delivery has to change. Verbal-only ICQs leak attention fast. Pair every check with a gesture: thumbs up or thumbs down for yes/no, hold up fingers for “how many minutes,” point to the worksheet for “where do you write.”

Choral response works better than nominated response with this age group, because no individual child gets put on the spot. Ask “Are you writing or speaking?” and have the whole class shout the answer. You’ll hear the confused students lagging half a beat behind, and that’s the signal to repeat the instruction.

Visual ICQs — a thumbs-up board, a stoplight card on each desk — also handle the issue that young learners often understand the task but can’t yet produce the English needed to confirm it. Don’t punish them for limited output by demanding verbal confirmation.

ICQs in Online and Hybrid Lessons

Online classrooms make ICQs more important, not less. You can’t see thirty students’ faces at once, you can’t drift between tables, and chat windows hide confusion behind a wall of polite silence the way physical classrooms hide it behind nodding.

The lightest workable adaptation: every ICQ becomes a one-click answer. Use the polling tool, or ask students to type “1” or “2” in chat, or use reaction emojis. “Type 1 if you’re writing, 2 if you’re speaking” gives you a count in three seconds and shows which screen names didn’t engage. That’s diagnostic data you cannot get from a yes/no head-nod over Zoom.

Breakout rooms compound the problem because once you click “open,” the instruction window closes. Build ICQs into the visible slide, not the spoken instruction — students re-read the slide once they’re in the room. Verbal-only instructions to breakout groups are a near-guarantee that two of the four rooms will start the wrong task.

Where ICQs Fit in a CELTA-Style Lesson Plan

On the official Cambridge CELTA framework, ICQs sit in the staging notes column of your lesson plan, attached to the instruction-giving for each productive or controlled-practice stage. They are not optional decoration on a CELTA observed lesson — assessors look for them by name in your plan and listen for them in delivery.

The cleanest way to write them up: directly under each instruction, indent three ICQs in bullet form, with the expected answer in brackets. This shows the assessor that you planned them in advance rather than improvising in the moment, which is the actual skill being assessed. The same logic applies inside a PPP lesson plan — each practice stage needs its own ICQ set, not a generic one inherited from the presentation.

Write Your ICQs Before You Stand Up

The teachers who use ICQs well don’t invent them on the fly — they write three per task into the margin of the lesson plan the night before. It takes ninety seconds per activity and removes almost every “wait, what are we doing?” moment from the next morning’s lesson. Try it for one week and count how many fewer times you have to walk the room re-explaining the task. That number is the case for keeping the habit forever.

Källor

1. Cambridge CELTA qualification — the official framework where ICQs appear as a planned-instruction staging requirement.
2. British Council TeachingEnglish — Giving Instructions — practitioner guidance on closed-question instruction checks.
3. Jo Gakonga ELT Training — Instruction Checking Questions — CELTA-focused breakdown of when to use ICQs and when to skip them.
4. ESL Activity — ICQs in Language Classes — classroom examples across activity types.