انواع سوال - عملکرد

Question Type: Function

Function questions are a type of question that asks about the use, the purpose of a specific part of a lecture, conversation or discussion. In order to answer function questions, we need to know why something is said, that means we need to know what the person is thinking. What are their intentions, what do they expect, what do they want, what are they trying to communicate?

It’s not just about words, we need to know more than the details, we need to get in the speakers head. If this is new for you it is an idiom meaning, think like somebody. If you know what somebody is thinking then you are in their head. You only have about one of these per recording, you might have none, you might have two for each recording but you’ll probably have about five in your full listening section.

If you have a long listening section with nine recordings, then you’ll more likely have seven or eight. Of course, you might only have four or three and you could have five or six, but the point is that this is a medium frequency question. It’s pretty common, but it’s not the most common. In order to answer it correctly think about context.

Now, if you know the overall scene, the big picture, then you can much better get in somebody’s head and if you can contextualize, understand the situation, the reasons. Then you can better say, why something happens. Let’s see the question format. These questions often follow a very strict, very regular format.

Here is an example, why does the professor say this? This is the most common type of function question. You could see this same exact wording with maybe, student, pretty often on your TOEFL. Why does the student say this? It’s the same question, and this is a listen again question, that means that before you read the question, you’ll actually get to listen again to about 10 or maybe 15 seconds of a conversation.

And then after the question, you’ll have an even smaller clip, and you’ll listen again to just a couple seconds of the conversation or lecture one more time. So that means altogether, you hear the section that the question is about once when you listen to the full recording once before the question and one very small specific word phrase or sentence after the question. Okay.

Here’s another example. What does the student mean when she says this, it’s really the same isn’t it? What and why are a little bit different, but when you see what mean, it is about the same as why, very, very similar. And here’s another listen again question.

What does the student imply about her knowledge of European history when she says this? Okay, this is a little bit tricky, the imply because this looks like an inference question but it not an inference question really. Because we are using this very specific detail, what you’re going to hear again and we’re trying to understand her thinking from that detail, that makes this a function question.

Now, we don’t need to know what type of question it is to answer it correctly. It can help us to choose our strategy in answering, but on test day if you see this question, you’re not going to think, oh, is it an inference question or a function question? That’s not important, right? You need to be familiar with the form and what know you should do next.

Okay, and let’s look at one more example. Why does the student describe her friend’s appearance? This one’s different, all these are listen again. This question is not, notice, though, we do have a very specific part of the conversation. The student describes her friend’s appearance, this is probably just one or two sentences from the listening.

So if you can remember those sentences, and remember what the context was, what was the part of the conversation and what was the student trying to communicate then you can answer correctly, even without the listen again