You may not know it but you are probably making mistakes with auxliliary verbs in questions. So in this video lets review the simplest way to form questions and look at how auxiliary verbs are really important.
A common mistake with Auxiliary Verbs in Questions
Students often ask me questions like;
“Teacher, what means this word?”
But this question is wrong. Can you see what is wrong with it? It’s very common mistake but the student should have said;
“Teacher, what does this word mean?
So, the student has not used the auxiliary verb ‘does’. If you have seen the last few lessons then you will know how important auxliliary verbs in questions are when forming tenses.
So Auxliliary verbs in Questions are very important, because we change the order of the auxiliary verb and the subject. This is one of the ways we know it is a question. There are other types of question using ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘when’ and we will look more at these in the next video. But what we are learning about here is auxiliary verbs and how they work with questions. So lets make sure we all understand what an auxiliary verb is.
Examples
In the sentence;
“She is reading a book.”
The word ‘is’ which is a form of the verb ‘to be’ is the auxiliary verb. ‘She’ is the subject, reading is the main verb and ‘a book’ is the object. This sentence is in the present continuous tense, and we know this not just because it has the ‘.ing’ form of the main verb but because the auxiliary verb is ‘to be’. So to make this a question, we put the auxiliary verb before the subject.
“Is she reading a book?”
When we ask a question like this, starting with an auxiliary verb, it can always be answered with a yes or a no. Lets look at a couple more examples.
“They have been to New York.”
As a question that would be;
“Have they been to New York.”
The auxiliary verb is ‘have’ which means it is the perfect tense.
“They were working when I called.”
As a question that would be;
“Were they working when I called?”
Here the auxiliary verb is were which is a past form of ‘to be’ so we know the tense is continuous again but this time it is past continuous.
“You walk to work every day.”
This one is a little bit different. You might have noticed that there is no auxiliary verb in this sentence. This is because the tense is present simple. And with the simple tenses, the auxiliary verb is do, but because we use them a lot, we don’t need to say the auxiliary verb all the time when the sentece is positive. But we do need it to make negative sentences and questions. So as a question this would be;
“Do you walk to work every day?”
Auxiliary Verbs in Questions is important
So this is the most basic way of making a question. There are other ways to form questions and we will look at those in future lessons. But this way of using the auxiliary verb before the subject is very important because it applys to other types of question too.