Abstract
This article describes the basis of Questioning the Author, an approach to encourage students to engage with text ideas. The article begins with a description of what motivated us to design the approach, which was based on a series of studies conducted in the 1980s that provided a revealing look at how young readers interact with the ideas in their textbooks. We observed that students tended to resist grappling with text ideas, but rather dealt with text at a surface level. We hypothesized that students could be encouraged to consider text ideas if the reading situation was set up as a dialogue with a text's author—thus our notion of Questioning the Author. Examples of how Questioning the Author functions in classrooms are provided. A summary of findings from implementations of Questioning the Author are presented in terms of changes in the roles of both teachers and students in classroom discussion.
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Beck, I.L., McKeown, M.G. Inviting Students Into the Pursuit of Meaning. Educational Psychology Review 13, 225–241 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016671722022
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016671722022