| How does asking questions help comprehension? |
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Research Taster
Skilled readers are especially good at generating their own questions about the text. It seems that this process of setting up questions for the text to answer helps readers to notice and recognise relevant information when it appears. Generating a question seems to set up ‘watchers’ inside the reader’s head to spot the needed information when it appears. Teaching children to question a text for themselves can help improve reading comprehension. 
Your evidence
You might like to ask a group of readers in your class what strategies they currently use to find out the meaning of a text. You could ask the group questions such as: What helps you to find information you think is useful? Do you do anything to help you remember what you have already read? What do you do if there is something you don’t understand in a text? Has anyone in the group tried something different that has helped them to understand what they are reading better? If you prefer, you could audiotape the discussion, so as to give you more time to analyse their answers. What strategies seem to be commonly used? Are there any surprises? Moving forward Once you have explored what your pupils currently do when they approach a text, you might like to ask them to try out making up their own questions about a text before reading it. Pupils could work in small groups to brainstorm questions they’d like to use on a text with an intriguing title. Each group could agree their top three questions, then read the text and attempt to answer them. What did your pupils think of this question-raising activity? Did they feel it helped them to read and understand the text? Did any pupils find that they were ‘on the look out’ for specific information and manage to spot it when it appeared in the text? Would they want to try a similar activity again? What did they find difficult? Their responses might highlight other ways in which you could support your pupils to interrogate text. You could also analyse their written answers to see how they compare with previous work. Find out more  Hurry, J. & Parker, M. (2004) The role of awareness in the teaching and learning of literacy and numeracy at key stage 2, TLRP Annual Conference, (Cardiff, November). Available at: http://www.tlrp-archive.org/cgi-bin/search_oai_all.pl?pn=15&no_menu=1&short_menu=1 The full project is The role of awareness in the teaching and learning of literacy and Numeracy in Key Stage 2 (2001 – 2004) by Prof. Terezina Nunes, Prof. Peter Bryant and Dr. Jane Hurry. The project website is at: http://www.tlrp.org/proj/phase11/phase2h.html |
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