Want Your Students to Seem More Likeable? Research Tells Us How.

My students wouldn’t stop. I had expected the activity to go for 10 minutes, but none of my students seemed to notice my signal at that point.

This was during a teacher-training lesson, and I wanted my students to experience a pair-activity that they could use with their future students. I put them in pairs and gave them the activity handout. Soon, the conversational-noise level rose along with some laughing. After about 10 minutes, I tried to get their attention in order to conclude the activity, but nobody noticed. Fifteen minutes passed, and I flickered the classroom lights, but still nobody stopped talking. At last, I turn off the classroom lights, which alerted most of them that I wanted their attention. Even then, though in darkness, some pairs continued talking.

These were American university students training to teach ESL. I thought it would be interesting for my native English-speaking students to experience an ESL activity called “Asking follow-up questions,” with the goal of having them notice the language skills that were being developed (listening to a question, formulating a response, asking a follow-up question, responding). However, I certainly wasn’t expecting it to change the classroom dynamics in such a positive way.

As soon as they started the activity, they no longer were teachers-in-training, but instead, people focused intently on each other. Students who had previously not seemed to even be aware of each other suddenly were obviously enjoying their partner’s complete attention.

Interestingly, I’ve seen the same response from session participants when I’ve presented this activity at professional conferences for teachers. Yes, I’ve had to flicker the lights to get their attention too. And usually these were people who had been total strangers.

I found research that helped me understand the reaction my students and conference participants had to this “follow-up questions” activity. Karen Huang and her research team at the Harvard Business School analyzed more than 300 online and face-to-face conversations between people getting to know each other. In one study, participants engaged in a 15-minute conversation with a randomly assigned person. Some of the participants were told to ask many questions (at least nine) and others were told to ask few questions (less than four). After the conversations ended, the participants told the researchers how much they liked their conversation partner. The results showed that the people who asked more follow-up questions were considered more likeable.

A second study looked at the effects of asking follow-up questions at a speed-dating event involving 300 participants. The researchers analyzed the number of questions and follow-up questions the participants asked and found that the people who asked follow-up questions were more likely to be asked for a second date.

As the researchers noted, the point is to have a dialog, not just a police-style interrogation. This means listening to someone’s answer and asking a follow-up question

After reviewing these studies, NPR’s social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam concluded, “This is a learnable skill, and it’s a skill that is useful to learn.”

Indeed, it is. Briefly, here is the three-step follow-up questions activity that I use with my ESL students (and that I shared with my teacher-training students and conference participants). The steps are designed to not only help students develop this technique and their language skills, but also to let them experience the positive effects it can have on them.

Step 1: Students are introduced to the technique by working individually with model conversations.

Step 2: In a Student A / Student B format, pairs practice the technique in a structured exercise. For example, their papers will look like something like this:

Step 3: Together, the pair write 5–10 questions about any topics they want.

Step 4: Each student is matched up with a different partner. They read their questions and ask follow-ups.

For the complete activity handout, see Follow-Up Questions activity.

A more free-form format which still includes some structure would be this:

This process has been used with students from over 40 countries and has always had the same results: the volume of voices rises, and the smiling and laughing increase as students move through the steps. Moreover, I noticed students seemed to have formed a bit of a bond with their partners. And they tend to apply this technique not only whenever they are in pair and small-group discussions, but also when interacting casually before and after class with students whom they previously had had little interaction.