The Impact of Using the Self-Questioning Strategy (Question Generation) on Language Comprehension

Skilled readers interact with the text by asking themselves questions as they read: Who is speaking? Why did the author choose this example? Do I understand what I am reading? In contrast, struggling readers and individuals with disabilities cannot ask questions before reading, during reading, or after reading. Therefore, these students, in particular, need direct instruction and learning how to practice self-questioning along with developing independent reading skills so that they become better at understanding written or spoken language. It also contributes to helping students build the skills they need to be college students or ready to understand the texts they encounter during work.

Self-questioning is an ongoing process of asking questions before, during, and after reading that the reader uses to understand the text. The questions asked are based on evidence found in the text and are generated to stimulate the reader's curiosity while attempting to verify, understand, and grasp the text. The self-questioning strategy is a set of steps that the student follows to generate, reflect on, predict, investigate, and answer questions that satisfy their curiosity about the text they have read.

In addition, self-questioning is built upon students' abilities to formulate answers to factual, interrogative, and evaluative questions. Factual questions have answers directly stated in the text. Meanwhile, inferential or probing questions include responses that are stated indirectly or require other information that the student looks for within the text. Evaluative questions require the reader to formulate their response based on their opinion and conclusion after reading the text.

How can self-questioning strategies help your students?

Many students have not learned that they can increase their comprehension by using self-questioning as a strategy, and they have not learned how to use self-questioning strategies as an ongoing process to connect with the text (for example, Why am I reading this? How can I use this information? Do I agree with this part of the text or disagree with the writer?). Self-questioning requires the reader to search for textual evidence that makes them wonder, think about possible meanings, and ask questions about the meanings contained in the text. Self-questioning is more than just asking questions. Students must learn to pay attention to textual meanings they usually pass over. They must then use their background knowledge to generate questions and predictions. However, the student must learn that answers may not be found for all questions, and those predictions may not be accurate. Then the student must learn to correct their thinking about the exact meaning of the text they read. This is important, as some research indicates that once some students make certain judgments or predictions about what will be read, they will read to confirm their prediction regardless of the information actually presented in the text. Teachers need to teach and train students to use self-questioning strategies that help students learn to continuously question, predict, confirm, correct, and reconcile information. When students encounter texts in different content areas, they need an approach to question what they read.

Asking students to practice self-questioning and read without the teacher routinely describing and modeling how to use an appropriate self-questioning strategy—especially with varying text lengths, content areas, and text complexities—will not improve students' ability to learn self-questioning; rather, it may create difficulty for the student through poor practice of the strategy and weak reading comprehension.

What types of self-questioning strategies might I teach?

Self-questioning can be used before, during, and after reading a text. The self-questioning strategy for use during reading should first be described in some detail, followed by a description of how to use the strategy before and after reading.

1. Pre-reading reading strategy: This strategy focuses on teaching students to use the self-questioning process as a way to preview the text before reading begins and generate a set of guiding questions to check comprehension during reading.
2. During-reading self-reading strategy. This strategy focuses on teaching students to use a self-questioning process while reading paragraphs and sections of the text.
3. Post-reading self-strategy. This strategy focuses on teaching students how to ask and answer questions after reading the text. This strategy is typically used for studying and self-testing the information that was supposed to be gained from the text.

How the self-questioning strategy can be applied in reading:

Before reading:

1. Engage students in identifying the three types of self-questions.
2. Elicit self-questions from students as a sample of homework assignments.
3. Ask students to participate in creating examples of questions.

During reading:

1. During the reading period, ask students to read the first part of the text and think about the questions students might ask or look for an answer to questions previously asked by the teacher.
2. Ask students to continue listening to the teacher's oral reading of the rest of the text and ask students to imagine that the teacher is the author of the text or story. What questions would students ask the teacher about the story? What are you asking me?
3. Pause reading at natural breaks so students can write down questions on paper.

After reading:

1. Display a blank three-column chart of the three types of questions on the board. Ask some students to write their self-questions, and enter the students' questions into the appropriate column.
2. Ask students to generate more questions of all three types.
3. Ask students to reflect on a deeper evaluation question: Example: How was human life in the past different from our life now?

As for those students who need more help:

1. Provide a list of self-questioning practices. Review two questions—one evaluative and the other factual or interrogative.
2. Identify the evaluative question and be prepared to discuss why the question is evaluative and how to answer the question.
3. Ask students to read the text carefully on their own or with a partner. Or ask students to work in groups to generate three questions—an evaluative question, a factual question, and an interrogative question.
4. Ask students to categorize each question type while explaining why they used that categorization.
5. Ask students to answer the questions as a way to check their comprehension. Ask students to exchange their questions with other students.

References:

Learning, U. (2018). Comprehension: Instruction. Retrieved from http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/comp/comp_dr_1.php.

Self-Questioning to Support Reading Comprehension | LD Topics | LD OnLine. (2018). Retrieved from http://www.ldonline.org/article/61887/

Vaughn, S., & Bos, C. (2013). Strategies for teaching students with learning and behavior problems (9th ed., p. 249). Person Education

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Originally published in Arabic. This English version was produced with AI-assisted translation; the Arabic original remains the reference.