Customer Reviews

Questioning the Author: An Approach for Enhancing Student Engagement with Text

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QtA helps young readers become thinking readers. By posing queries before, during and after reading, the teacher guides her students to become independent, thoughtful readers who can make sense out of oftentimes poorly-written or hard-to-understand texts. This strategy appears applicable to all age-levels. The book is written in an easy to understand style and includes sample lessons.Questioning the Author is a MUST READ for all teachers and should be included in teacher preparation curriculums.

How does one teach comprehension? With the current obsession on phonics and code emphasis, I find QtA a refreshing read. Tried, tested and proven in classrooms, QtA is based on the idea that reading is about constructing meaning, more so than just breaking the code. To use this approach, the teacher has to really read the text well first, grasp its main ideas as intended by the author, and plan to guide the students to arrive at those ideas. She also has to anticipate the difficulties encountered by her students as they read the text, and consider the fallibility of the author in fleshing out his ideas. These elements make QtA a teaching approach different from the traditional ways of teaching comprehension. One can even combine it with other strategies, such as KWL.

I used this book in conjunction with literature circles in my middle school classroom and found the strategies useful. It aided in comprehension and gave the students a paradigmatic scaffold with which they could structure the info that they read. The book is short and a fast read, although some of the suggestions were a little obvious. Overall, a good resource for first-year teachers, but anything above that might not find that much new info.