In a reading or listening lesson, specific information questions (sometimes known as "finding specific information") are the easiest task after the gist task, and so usually follow the gist task in the task cycle. Sometimes, depending on the text, specific information questions can be done as the first task instead of a gist task, if the text doesn't lend itself to a gist question. (For more information about the task cycle, see here).
Specific information questions can take many forms (short answer questions, multiple choice questions, true or false questions, fill in the blank questions, etc). But what makes them specific information questions is that they are asking the students to pick out little bits of specific information in the text. The who, the what, the where, the when. (But not the why.)
Specific information questions only ask the students to find information that is explicitly stated in the text. They don't ask the students to make any inferences about the text. So don't ask students why something happened unless it is explicitly stated in the text.
Specific information questions are also usually about sentence level comprehension. They ask about information that is contained in one sentence, but they do not ask the student to comprehend multiple sentences.
Specific information questions are often (although not always) things like names of people or specific numbers that appear in the text--e.g. "How old is Tom?" "How many years has he worked as a teacher?" "Who is the principle of the school?" etc.
Below is a somewhat contrived example, but hopefully it serves to illustrate. Imagine students are given the following paragraph as part of a reading text.
"Tom was 52 years old. He had grey hair, and blue eyes. He was riding his bicycle home from work. Tom was a teacher. He had been teaching for 30 years. He was very tired. The students had been very difficult and noisy today. 'I can't wait until I retire,' Tom thought to himself."
Based on this text, the following could be specific information questions:
How old is Tom?
What color is Tom's hair?
What color are Tom's eyes?
What is Tom riding?
What is Tom's job?
How long has Tom been teaching for?
...etc.
The following would not be specific information questions:
How old was Tom when he started teaching? (This is a detailed comprehension questions, because it involves taking information from two separate sentences in the text, and understanding how they fit together.)
Does Tom like his job? (This is an inference question. It's not explicitly stated that he doesn't like his job, but we can infer that from the fact that he is looking forward to retirement.)
Would you like to have Tom's job? Why or why not? (This is a personalization question.)
Detailed comprehension questions, inference questions, and personalization questions are all valuable, of course. But they are also more difficult, so they would typically come in a later stage of the lesson. (Again, see the task cycle here).
Specific information questions involve picking out little details from the text, rather than understanding the whole text in detail. In a reading lesson, they can usually be answered by scanning through the text to find the answer, and for that reason, they lend themselves to scanning race games. They don't have to be done as a race, of course, but they can be if you have a class who likes games or who likes running around. Possible games include scanning race game, garbage man and quizziz.
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I once worked with a CELTA tutor who used the following example to demonstrate how not to make specific information questions.
The teacher trainees were instructed to "read the passage, and answer the questions below."
1. Kuka Johannes Wassermann on?
2. Miten hän tuli Hampurista Helsinkiin?
3. Mista hän ajoi omalla autolla Lappiin?
4. Mitä hän näki lapissa?
5. Missä hän kävi?
The point was, as you can probably already see, that it was possible to answer these questions without understanding the text at all. The text and the questions are written in Finnish, but I don't speak a word of Finnish and was still able to work out the answers for each question. For each question, you just look at the line, and see which word is omitted. So for number 1 "Kuka Johannes Wassermann on?", you just look at the first line, and see that the answer has to be "saksalinen".
And the whole point of this exercise was to make the trainees realize that if the purpose of the reading task is to guide students to greater comprehension of the text, then you want to avoid using questions that are worded exactly the same as the text.
So, just as a quick example, if the text said something like, "Tom worked as a teacher", then a specific information question like "What did Tom work as?" would be too easy. But you could paraphrase it just a little bit, and say something like "What was Tom's job?" or " What did Tom do to earn money?" et cetera.
That being said, however, in my opinion it depends on the level of the students. I've had some low-level classes where the students were so weak that they were struggling with the simple skill of just scanning through the reading text to find the answer--even if I used the same wording as the text. So for those classes, I didn't even bother trying to paraphrase the question until the students got a bit more confident just answering specific information questions generally.
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