Yes and no questions are just one step away from declarative sentences.
If English learners can form the latter,
then they just need to learn this one thing to form questions as well.
Question forms shouldn’t be taught separately from affirmative forms,
and learners don’t need to create questions from scratch.
Instead, use the basic structure that students already know as the starting point.
The key is helping verbs.
Elementary students may not know this term yet,
but they are probably already familiar with the words.
Helping verbs are the little verbs that come in front of the main verbs.
They are also the words that ‘not’ is attached to, often as a contraction.
The most common helping verbs early learners use are DO, HAVE, CAN, and BE.
Both questions and short answers depend on helping verbs,
so make sure learners can identify these before moving on.
Okay, here’s the one step you need to turn an affirmative sentence into a question.
Take the helping verb, and place it at the beginning.
That’s it!
Well, okay, you’ll also need to adjust capitalization,
and change the end punctuation into a question mark.
But in terms of word order,
all you have to do is place the helping verb at the beginning of the sentence.
The beauty of this is that it works for any tense, any mood, and any voice.
As students advance, they’ll see that having a helping verb at the beginning of a sentence
is a consistent feature of yes/no questions.
If you have multi-word helping verbs or more than one helping verb together,
you only move the first word of it.
Now, you may ask, “What if there was no helping verb in the original sentence?”
There are two variations of this.
First, if the main verb was TO BE, then we move that to the front of the sentence.
It’s the only word that can act like a helping verb and the main verb at the same time.
But for any other main verb, we add DO to the beginning.
(This requires the extra step of putting the main verb in its base form.)
Anyway,
most of the time we use DO, it’s because we need a helping verb and don’t already have one.
So, there you have it.
The most important thing to remember about yes/no questions,
other than that they end with a question mark,
is that they start with some form of DO, HAVE, BE, or a modal verb like ‘can’ or ‘will’.
The ability to correctly form yes/no questions is very important.
Of course, they are used frequently and are instrumental in basic communication.
But even beyond that, they serve as the foundation for other question types,
such as either-or questions
negative questions,
and object questions.
Alright, time for the short answers.
Start with ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and a comma.
Next comes a pronoun that reflects the original subject.
And then there’s the helping verb, the same one we used in the question.
At this point, you can see that each question-and-answer pair is bookended by a helping verb.
Start with do and end with do,
or start with have and end with have, and so on.
That’s it for positive answers,
but negative answers still need the word ‘not’.
That’s pretty important, so we put that at the very end,
often contracted with the helping verb.
And that’s how you do short answers!
Now, suppose you understand these structures but want to alter the context just a bit.
Perhaps you need to change it from present to past.
For both the question and the answer, the only thing you need to change is the helping verb.
Similarly, when changing to a 3rd-person singular subject, for example,
the only other thing that needs to reflect that change is ...
you guessed it: the helping verb.
To summarize: it’s all about the helping verbs.
To make yes/no questions, start with the affirmative version of the sentence you want to ask,
then move the helping verb to the front.
For short answers, cut out all the words of the longer sentence after the helping verb,
except ‘not’ for negatives.
Teaching students this concept at an early stage
provides them with the groundwork to craft all kinds questions and answers at more advanced levels.