| Teacher questions or pupil questions? |
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Research Taster
When teachers are asked what strategies they use to teach reading comprehension, most say that the use of direct oral questioning is an important one. Classroom observation bears this out. Teachers more often use direct oral questioning to teach reading comprehension than any other strategy – perhaps as much as 70% of the time, according to one study. Yet pupils rarely seem to ask questions and it is rare for teachers to explicitly suggest that pupils might find this helpful or to give them opportunities to practise asking questions for themselves. Few teachers (only 2% in one study) mention supporting pupil’s understanding by encouraging them to form their own questions. 
Your evidence
You might like to explore patterns of asking questions within your own classroom, in order to see whether there is room for pupils to take a more active role in this activity. You could tape record a lesson and then choose three five-minute periods (perhaps at the beginning, middle and end of the lesson) to find out more about who asks what in your classroom. Make a note of any questions asked during each period and also: who asked the question? Who answered? If pupils asked a question, was this related to the text? What was the purpose of each question? Moving forward Having sampled the questions used within a teaching session in your class, you could analyse the data in more detail. Can you see any patterns in who asks and who answers? Is there room for pupils to take a more active role in asking questions? Did any particular types of questions seem to lead to deeper learning conversations? You could discuss your findings from your pupils’ current experiences with a colleague and work together to design or refine particularly effective questions, or to plan how you could experiment with changing patterns of questioning in your class. 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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