Questioning the Author: A Yearlong Classroom Implementation to Engage Students with Text

Abstract

This article describes the development and implementation of Questioning the Author, an instructional intervention that focuses on having students grapple with and reflect on what an author is trying to say in order to build a representation from it. The implementation involved a social studies teacher, a reading/language arts teacher, and their 23 inner-city fourth-grade students in a small parochial school. Analyses of transcripts of videotaped lessons and classroom observations revealed that teacher talk decreased in quantity and increased in quality with more emphasis on questions focused on constructing and extending meaning and more skill in refining and using students' comments in discussion. Changes in the content of student talk were also documented. These included an increase in the number and complexity of studentinitiated questions and evidence of the development of student collaboration. Teachers' journal entries and students' responses in interviews provided insights about their views of the implementation. Current models of reading emphasize that successful reading is a constructive endeavor in which readers actively make sense of information in text by putting ideas together and integrating them with prior knowledge. Research with students and their interactions with texts has shown, however, that younger and less adept readers tend to take a less than active role in the reading process. Inexperienced readers are less likely to note inconsistencies in text content (Markman, 1979), to monitor what they understand from their reading (Cross & Paris, 1988; Garner & Taylor, 1982), and to employ strategies to keep their reading on track (Paris & Oka, 1986). Recently, much work has focused on developing instructional techniques to en

Early Predictors of Reading Comprehension Difficulties

“…Established reading comprehension programs such as Reciprocal Teaching (Palinscar & Brown, 1984), Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (Guthrie et al, 2004), Transactional Strategies Instruction (Brown, Pressley, van Meeter, & Schuder, 1996) and Questioning the Author (Beck, McKeown, Sandora, Kucan, & Worthy, 1996) are made much more approachable for teachers in Sweden (Westlund, 2009). The aim of these programs is to teach reading strategies to children.…”

Summary of Research and Implications for Practice on Reading Interventions for Young English-Language Learners with Reading Difficulties

“…In the primary grades, teachers can use read-alouds combined with extended talk about words to teach new words, including more sophisticated words than those that students can read independently 33 . In the upper elementary years, teachers can introduce more sophisticated and increasingly academic vocabulary through texts, and increase the emphasis on word-learning strategies 34 .…”

Teacher Study Group

“…The items in the comprehension and vocabulary domains reflect two major pedagogical aspects of effective instruction: explicitness of instruction and interactivity of instruction (i.e., the amount of scaffolding practice and feedback provided) (Beck, McKeown, Sandora, Kucan, & Worthy, 1996;Pressley, 1998;Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991). Items in the RCV Observation…”