• The research showed that students:
  • spoke up more during lessons, even the quieter students
  • gained new understanding of vocabulary and text meaning through negotiated interaction with peers and teachers
  • showed some improvements on reading comprehension test scores, though these developed over time and were not initially significant

• QtA complements the existing English language curriculum by incorporating open-ended discussion with questioning strategies to build on students’ understanding of the reading text

Why Questioning the Author?

To enable students to become independent, thoughtful readers, Questioning the Author (Beck, McKeown, Sandora, Kucan & Worthy, 1996; Beck & McKeown , 2006) encourages the use of open-ended discussions with strategies to probe meanings in text passages. It promotes the notion of teacher and students discovering meanings of text together through query-driven discussions.

QtA has been introduced to students and teachers of a mainstream primary school, where participating students showed improvement in overall reading comprehension tests over a three-year period. Teachers also found that QtA aided students in comprehending vocabulary and understanding the ideas in reading passages.

How Does it Work?

Questioning the Author provides a framework for leading reading comprehension discussion. A key feature is to help students understand that a text is a collection of ideas written by a fallible author; therefore, the text may be ambiguous or incomplete. In this way, QtA makes texts less intimidating to students and encourages students to think critically while they read.

A QtA lesson involves teachers using initiating and follow-up queries to build learners’ understanding of a text during reading. The query-based discussion helps students learn to explore and probe the meanings of texts. This trains their overall comprehension skills and facilitates their development as independent readers.

• Analyses of classroom discussions showed many examples of students gaining new understanding of vocabulary and text meaning.
• Query-driven discussion with teachers and peers encouraged students to explore and explain ideas in novel ways which they did not experience during structured reading lessons.
• Initially, students in the intervention group displayed a slightly higher improvement (non-significant) in reading tests as compared with a non-intervention group.

• Students who participated for three years along with teachers who participated for three years showed significant gains.

How Can Teachers Get Started?

• Teachers can prepare a text for QtA by
  • ‘chunking’ it into meaningful segments to identify the ‘major understanding’ of each segment; and
  • drafting potential initiating and follow-up ‘queries’ for each segment
    • Example of an initiating query: “What do you think the author is trying to say here?”
    • Example of a follow-up query: “How does that fit with what the author told us before?”

• When reading the text in class, the initiating and follow-up queries may be used to facilitate class discussion. The goal is to guide the students’ thinking and scaffold students’ construction of meaning around the text.

Related links

• SingTeach, Issue 31, 2011, p. 1 “Look Who’s Talking in Your Classroom”
• SingTeach, Issue 52, 2015, p. 3, “Sustaining a Teaching Intervention”
• ReEd, Vol. 14, 2014, p. 4, “Sustaining Good Classroom Interventions” [PDF]
• ReEd, Vol. 21, 2017, p. 5, “In Pursuit of Continuous Teacher Development” [PDF]
• Research Brief Series, No. 16-017, “The Crucial Time Factor in Sustainable Teacher Development and Assessment of Student Outcomes”

Further Readings

• Beck, I. L., & McKeown, M. G. (2002). Questioning the Author: Making sense of social studies. Educational Leadership, 60(3), 44-47.
• Beck, I. L., & McKeown, M. G. (2006). Improving comprehension with Questioning the Author: A fresh and expanded view of a powerful approach. New York: Scholastic Inc. Amazon
• Beck, I. L., McKeown, M., Sandora, C., Kucan, L. & Worthy, J. (1996). Questioning the Author: A yearlong classroom implementation to engage students with text. The Elementary School Journal, 96(4), 385-414.
• Foong, P. Y., Png, J. L. H., Rasidir, R. A., & Silver, R. (2009, November). Questioning-the-author: Primary school students’ perceptions. Paper presented at the ERAS Conference, Singapore, Questioning-the-author: Primary school students’ perceptions.
• Jones, R.C. (2007). Strategies for Reading Comprehension: Questioning the Author. Retrieved May 19, 2010 from www.readingquest.org/strat/qta.html.
• Kim, Y-h., & Silver, R. E. (2016). Provoking reflective thinking in post observation conversations. Journal of Teacher Education, 67, (3), 203-219.
• Kogut, G. & Silver, R. E. 2009. Teacher talk, pedagogical talk and classroom activities. Paper presented at the 3rd Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference, Singapore, 1 – 3 June 2009.
• Png, J. 2016. Questioning the Author: English Language Teachers’ Perspectives. International Journal of Bilingual & Multilingual Teachers of English, 4 (1).
• Silver, R. E. & Png, J. (2016). Learning to Lead Reading Comprehension. RELC Journal, 47,(1), 71-78

Research Team

For more information about this research, please contact the Principal Investigator A/P Rita SILVER at rita.silver@nie.edu.sg.

Principal Investigator

• A/P Rita Elaine SILVER, English Language and Literature (ELL), NIE

Co-Principal Investigator

• Dr PNG Lay Hoon, Jessie, ELL, NIE

Research Associates

• Ms Galyna KOGUT, Centre of Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP), NIE
• Ms Huynh Thi Canh Dien (formerly of NIE)
• Ms Raslinda A. R. (formerly of NIE)
• Ms Foong Poh Yi (formerly of NIE)