“Can You Give Me One Second?” Question Answering Techniques for Your Child!

We have all been there – sitting in the classroom, our minds slowly moving someplace else … before our teacher’s question jolt us back! In that impromptu, unprepared setting, how do we respond confidently? Well, our young communicators are likely to experience this in their day-to-day school life. As a developing public speaker, your child has the capacity and room to learn how to respond to questions efficiently and effectively!

A question-and-answer scenario is often an impromptu, unprepared, or unstructured communication setting. We may even have the responses ready in our mind, but the surprise of the moment may stall the mind and distract from the main points we wanted to deliver. The challenge is even starker for young public speakers as they grapple with difficult content or a challenging lesson. The goal for your child is thus to collect themselves and reach a confident response (which is also accurate to the question being asked!).

We draw from public speaking techniques to pick out three tips for your child in their journey as a confident answer-giver!

Public Speaking Tip #1: Take a Pause, Take a Moment

Any impromptu situation is challenging because the communicator must respond with limited preparation. This can apply even if your child has revised, memorised, and rehearsed the responses! The very nature of impromptu settings challenges your child to arrange their thoughts fast – searching their mind for relevant responses. Often, the challenge is not trying to recall what they have studied but to arrange (in their mind) the relevant response.

It is important to remind our young public speakers/communicators to slow down and take a pause when faced with a tough question. Instead of rushing to respond, take a few seconds to recollect and reflect on the question being asked. This reduces the immediate rushed body language cues such as pause-fillers, fast speaking speed, or hand gestures that are not purposeful—taking that few seconds also show the questioner that your child is trying to think critically before responding!

Public Speaking Tip #2: Clarify, Simplify, Summarise

After taking that second to pause, the next step is to go through a structured approach in responding to an impromptu question. As we shared above, your child may have all the content memorised in their mind – the challenge, however, is picking out only the relevant points that apply to the question. They should thus approach the question from the angle of wanting to respond with the complete answer.

To achieve this, your child can learn the various techniques to carve some additional thinking time – while also boosting the success of their responses. For example, they can aim to clarify key terms or premises that may not be clear in the question. Beyond this, your child may also choose to summarise or simplify/re-state the crux of the question (thus ensuring that their answers are more precise in relevance instead of a mere guess!).

Public Speaking Tip #3: Reiterate and Emphasise!

Having responded confidently, the job is not done! We always remind our young communicators about the importance of ending strong, especially in an impromptu setting. In such an unprepared scenario, our conclusion represents the final opportunity to ensure that our main answer to the question is understood accurately. A misunderstanding in such a setting may add to the pressure/stress of the situation!

Our young communicators should conclude on a strong note by creating emphasis as an ending to achieve this. For example, they can restate their answer’s main point or thesis statement as a summary before finishing the response. Beyond this, they can also continue to offer counter-questions or points (if the situation calls for it). These are opportunities to turn the stressful situation into a conversation!

Respond Efficiently and Effectively!

Ultimately, an impromptu, unprepared question-and-answer segment can be a challenging scenario for our young communicators. This may be a more common scenario than you would expect for our growing public speakers. The next time your child encounters a tough question to respond to, try out the tips that we have shared above!