Teaching Comprehension With Questioning Strategies That Motivate Middle School Readers

Middle-school literacy expert Larry Lewin shares 12 questioning strategies that boost students' critical thinking and comprehension during and after reading. Easy to integrate into reading assignments in any content-area, these classroom-tested techniques help students engage in a dialogue with the text they're reading, improve their recall and understanding, and build a strong sense of purpose for reading.

Strategies are scaffolded to provide plenty of instructional support. Students first learn to phrase questions to serve specific reading purposes, such as gathering information, making predictions, and responding to author bias. As they become more skilled at questioning their texts, students move on to more advanced techniques, such as QAR (Question-Answer Relationship) and QtA (Questioning the Author), which Lewin has specially adapted for middle-school students. Other features include teacher-student exchanges that demonstrate the strategies in action, step-by-step lessons, student work samples, and assessment ideas. For use with Grades 5 & Up.