When readers ask questions: Inquiry-based reading instruction

Ness, M. (2016). When readers ask questions: Inquiry-based reading instruction. The Reading Teacher, 70(2), 189-196.


Helping elementary school children learn to ask questions about texts—instead of just answering teacher questions--is the focus of this article. Two instructional activities are explained; both activities come from the work of Hallie Kay Yopp and Ruth Helen Yopp, professors at California State University at Fullerton. Their work is well-known to literacy educators, and their publications for classroom teachers are known for their detailed descriptions of engaging, child-centered learning activities.

Ness here chose to highlight two of those activities. The first activity, “Book Bits” (pp. 191-192) involves providing pertinent snippets (less than sentence-length) of a text to children before reading that text, asking them to make predictions about the text from those snippets, and then formulating questions from those predictions. There is plenty of teacher modeling and student talk along the way. As the text is read, students talk about how the text answers their questions, and after reading, more questions are generated; this time the questions go beyond the text, and may be researched using the Internet. Ness describes step by step how the activity was implemented in a fourth grade classroom.

The second activity, “Concrete Experiences” (pp. 192-194), involves having children observe three objects that are somehow related to a text they are about to read. Here, the activity is described as it was implemented with third graders reading an informational text about birds. The children observed the objects and predicted what the objects had to do with the text. As with the previous activity, questions are generated from the predictions, and during reading, there is talk about how the questions are answered by the text. With this activity, the text can be extended by interviewing an expert on the topic of the text and asking questions. Here, the interview was conducted using Skype.

Both activities intrigued me, and I wished I was still working with third and fourth graders so I could try them. Classroom teachers will like the detail provided and will probably want to try these two activities themselves. The descriptions are complete enough that I could imagine an elementary teacher reading about them tonight and trying them out with a class tomorrow. These engaging, child-centered activities also provide ways to differentiate instruction and ways to incorporate technology. I found I wanted to know about activities like this, so much so that I ordered one of Yopp and Yopp’s books.

Though Ness makes a good theoretical case for instruction that focuses on student-generated questions, there isn’t really much data presented here, at least not data on student learning outcomes. The data we see here are observations only, gathered from two classroom cases. We see some photos of student questions on chart paper, but we don’t really know how well the children comprehended the texts or what transferable skills they gained. I’ll definitely look for that kind of evidence when I read Yopp and Yopp’s book. I realize that this is a practitioner journal, but today’s classroom teachers do appreciate evidence-based instructional activities, and a bit more evidence would have been a good thing here.