Questioning


 * Questioning** reinforces the summarizing strategy and carries the learner one more step along in the comprehension activity whether it is reciprocal teaching or patterned reading. When students generate questions, they first determine what kind of information is important enough to provide the substance for a question. They then use this information in question form and self-test to ascertain that they can indeed answer their own question. Questioning is a flexible strategy to the extent that students can be taught and encouraged to generate questions at many levels. I choose to use Bloom's Taxonomy in my class as a reference to the level of questioning that the students do. I started the students off slow with the knowledge or literal questions and built them up to inferring and synthesizing the information in the text. When I am doing a read-aloud I ask the students questions throughout the book that are higher level thinking such as, "what do you think could of happened if....?" or "what would be the outcome of this situation if.....?" The students become engaged in the story and really think about what is taking place at that particular moment. I always refer back to Bloom's and ask the students, "what level of Bloom's was that question?" Some of the kids race to the board to look, and they share it with the rest of the class.