Present Simple Questions

Questions are not that difficult!!!

My teacher at school used to say: "... in order to make a question make up a sentence first in your head!" Believe it or not I still use it when I'm stuck in the middle of a talk!

The explanation first, than I will give some very good pieces of advice!

Almost every question in English is based on the structure of general questions. So how do we form a general question? Very simple. Start with the sentence. Let's look at the example.

Simon speaks French very well.
1 2 3
Here we notice the elements' position of a typical English sentence.
So far everything was clear, but from now we meet new element called auxilary verb (or simple - helping verb). It helps us to make questions and negatives.

Meet the helping verb for Present Simple - DO & DOES!!!

Here is the list that shows the order and position of words in the question:

In general questions we put Do or Does at the first place, before the Subject.
Subject: noun, pronoun or phrase that substitude it.
Verb: here you should use first form of a verb (infinitive form).
Object: here you should put any other information in the order what? where? when?

The most typical mistakes:

forgetting Do or Does. Yes, it is the most typical mistake:
e.g.Want you to go...?
You do go...?
You go there...?
Look at the point #1!
losing -(e)s:
e.g. Do he likes...?
Does he likes...?
In this case we use Does, but skip -(e)s at the end of the main verb!
Adding (e)s ending, when it is not needed:
e.g. Does they listen to ...?
Do they listens to ...?
The best solution to this problem is oral practice. The more times students will repeat the phrase or structure, the better they will remember it.
Maybe you have heard about teaching techniques based on repeating whole language patterns.