What are referential and display questions?
A referential question is a question to which the person asking does not know the answer. For example, you might ask a new student:
“Where are you from?” or “What is your name?”
The teacher does not know the answer to these questions; the purpose of asking these questions is to discover information, similar to the Info Gap activities.
A display question is a question to which the person asking does know the answer. For example, you might ask a student:
“What colour is my sweater” or “Do I have long or short hair?
The teacher clearly knows the answer to these questions; the purpose of asking is to promote student speaking, or to prompt students to remember certain information (whether it be vocabulary, grammar, etc.)