The Skill of Questioning – Hargie O.

The main aim of this passage is to stress the importance and relevance of questioning (in all forms) in our lives and communication skills.
It discusses the purpose of questioning, different types of questioning (closed, open, leading and recall to name a few) and when we might use them, and that asking questions can relate to having power i.e. if you’re a doctor or teacher as in the classroom it is the teacher who is asking the majority of the questions and doctors must ask questions to conclude a diagnosis.
The author uses lots of evidence to back up their statements, this was shown when they talked about how children with disabilities are subject to giving untrue and wrong answers when presented with leading questions. The author backed up this statement by having three other texts being referenced too. This means that what they are saying has been looked into and hypothesised by others. They have also backed up their evidence with diagrams of conversations, to emphasise the points they are making.
Waterman et al. (2001) claims that children become less accurate when they are asked closed questions, this is because when asked opened questions they will keep talking with all details they can remember with the odd prompt, whereas closed questions result in children responding with less detailed answers as they respond with what they have interpreted from the question. They also can get confused with yes or no questions because they may respond with no if they don’t understand the question or disagree rather than that being their actual response.

‘Finding out about others: the skill of questioning’, in Hargie, O. (2011) Skilled Interpersonal Communication: Research, Theory and Practice. 5th ed. London: Routledge.

• Group and leadership
o Was there a group leader? Yes.
o How was this chosen? Happened naturally due to previous experience.
o If informal, how did you know? What were the actions that marked them as a leader? They were able to give guidance.
o How did this impact on the rest of the group e.g. was there some underlying resentment/ did anyone feel excluded? I feel everyone felt included, and everyone was hands-on.
o What was most challenging for you about working in this group? (personal reflection) Lack of resources, due to other teams getting there before us. This meant I had to use my imagination and initiative more.
• Explaining
o How clearly did you think the group explained to you? Very well.
o What made this clear or unclear? They didn’t talk too fast and repeated things if we did not understand/hear.
o What stage of the 5Ps might have been missed out? Our Presentation stage wasn’t as well done as others, as we spent more time listening to other groups.
• Environment
o What was the impact of the environment on your communication? I don’t feel communication was affected much by being outside, as we still had to speak at an audible level and cleary.
o What changes did you make when explaining to others that you might not have considered in a typical classroom? Where to place them so they could understand what I was meaning by showing them because it was a very practical and not as obvious where to look as the focus was not on the front of the class like indoors.
o How challenging was it so speak above the sounds in the environment? How can we make this communication easier on both speaker and listener? It was quite peaceful outside today, so it wasn’t very difficult at all. However, I can see how it could cause an issue, and not trying to compete with the noise and communicating in close vicinity and using lots of non-verbal techniques will help against the challenge of the noise.
o When listening, did the environment distract you? How can we overcome this? No, I felt more relaxed in the environment which meant I could concentrate efficiently. If it was more distracting, giving a focus can help to stop me from being distracted.
• Negotiation
o Were your negotiations successful? Why/Why not? Yes, we swapped an item we no longer needed to something we could use more effectively.
o What was most challenging about these? How late they came in the activity when more of the materials had already been used, and people did not want to give up essential parts of their dens.

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