Tuesday, 5th April, 2022

Topic 1: Questioning technique

I. Pre-Reading Questioning
Pre-reading questions tend to be oriented toward activating prior knowledge, but they
might also be posed in ways that help students consider what they genuinely hope to
get out of a particular text and what their goals as readers are. To teach her students to
ask pre-reading questions, Ms. Ready uses the following techniques:

 She does not allow students to begin reading a new text before they have posed
at least three questions about the book.
 She models pre-reading questioning during read-alouds and shared reading.
 After her students complete reading a new book, she asks them to go back and
revisit their pre-reading questions to see if they can answer them and determine
how well their questions helped frame and inform their comprehension.

II. Guiding Questions

Guiding questions are designed to explore a topic in greater depth and encourage them
to elicit understanding by thinking deeply about the topic. Students must use their own
judgment to determine the answer.

The student uses what they have learned to form an appropriate answer.

Guiding questions help the students arrive at a particular endpoint by ‘guiding them.’ For
this reason, they are not considered very open-ended questions.

A guiding question must not include a suggestion as to the ‘correct’ answer. It cannot
ask ‘why is x good/bad?’ This is a leading question, and will not allow a student to
consider all aspects of a subject.

III. Comprehension questions

This list of questions for reading comprehension helps children respond to stories by

making connections, plausible predictions and formulating questions. This post covers 7
areas where we can support children’s comprehension. Each section suggests a list of
questions you can use with students. The different areas are:

 Story structure
 Making Predictions
 Author’s Purpose
 Summarising
 Making Connections
 Self-Monitoring and Self-Correction
 Inferring

Examples:

What is the title of this book?

What will happen next? How do you know?

Why do you think the author chose to write this story? 

What is the main idea of the story?

Does the story to character remind you of anyone?

Does that sound right?

 What was the message of the story?

IV. Discussion/Interpretation questions

Questions are the heart of discussion. A great question will challenge your students,
sparking collaborative thought-provoking class conversations that lead students to
communicate with their peers.

If the right questions are asked, students will be thoroughly engaged in the
discussion, through:

 communication
 critical thinking
 collaboration
 creativity
 problem solving
 and much more, which will prepare them for the challenges and opportunities of
today and the future.

Types of DQ:

1. Moral/ethical dilemmas- this get students thinking about the topic from multiple
sides, giving them a broader understanding of the subject;

2. Assess → Diagnose → Act - will help students through the process of problem
solving;
Assessment: What is the issue or problem at hand?

Diagnosis: What is the root cause of this issue or problem?

 Action: How can we solve the issue?

3. Compare and Contrast - Ask your students to make connections and identify
differences between ideas that can be found in class texts, articles, images, videos
and more etc.

4. Interpretive → Evaluative

5. Conceptual Changes- Both 4. and 5. get students forming their own ideas about a
topic based on the content they’ve read

6. Personal Exploration - Let students explore a new idea on their own terms. E.g.
What does _______ mean to you?

Topic 2: Methods of engaging actively with the text

Engaging with a text requires, first of all, that the reader identify key ideas, and look for
relationships among ideas:

 What points does the text present?

 What explanations does it offer?
 Does it identify any causal relationships, or does it break an idea into its
component parts?

The teacher can help students with basic comprehension of challenging texts.

Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers

who are in control of their own reading comprehension

Monitoring comprehension
Students to:
 Be aware of what they do understand
 Identify what they do not understand
 Use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension

Metacognition (thinking about thinking) - Before reading, they might clarify their
purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they might monitor their
understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing"
any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding
of what they read.
Graphic and semantic organizers
 Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text or
using diagrams. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps,
webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters

Answering questions
Questions can be effective because they:
 Give students a purpose for reading
 Focus students' attention on what they are to learn
 Help students to think actively as they read
 Encourage students to monitor their comprehension
 Help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already
know
Generating questions - Students learn to ask themselves questions that require them
to combine information from different segments of text. For example, students can be
taught to ask main idea questions that relate to important information in a text.
Recognizing story structure - students learn to identify the categories of content
(characters, setting, events, problem, resolution)
Summarizing
students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their
own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:
 Identify or generate main ideas
 Connect the main or central ideas
 Eliminate unnecessary information
 Remember what they read
Effective comprehension (explicit)
teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use,
and how to apply them. The steps of explicit instruction typically include direct
explanation, teacher modeling ("thinking aloud"), guided practice, and application.
 Direct explanation
The teacher explains to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to
apply the strategy.

 Modeling
The teacher models, or demonstrates, how to apply the strategy, usually by "thinking
aloud" while reading the text that the students are using.

 Guided practice
 The teacher guides and assists students as they learn how and when to apply the
strategy.

 Application
The teacher helps students practice the strategy until they can apply it independently.