Beck, Isabel L. & McKeown, Margaret G. (2006) Improving Comprehension with Questioning the Author: A Fresh and Expanded View of a Powerful Approach. New York: Scholastic.

Pages: 296     Price: $31.99     ISBN: 0-439-81730-7

Improving Comprehension with Questioning the Author: A Fresh and Expanded View of a Powerful Approach is a well-titled text. Beck and McKeown offer a refreshing alternative to the literal comprehension questions currently inundating basal reader anthologies and classroom reading instruction and assessment. Drawing on nearly 15 years of collaboration and research to support their assertions, the authors supply readers with a framework for engaging students with text in meaningful ways.

The authors define the focus of QtA (Questioning the Author) as, "the importance of students' active efforts to build meaning from what they read and the need for students to grapple with ideas in a text" (p.8). In order to construct meaning from text, students are reminded to ask questions of the author, to see the author as fallible. Carefully crafted lessons support these needs. Whereas most classroom instruction focuses on questioning before and after reading, Beck and McKeown contend that with QtA students are learning from the text during reading. This model is based on three features that have a positive influence on comprehension: coherent texts, relevant background knowledge, and a logical sequence of questions.

As previously stated, QtA is a framework, as opposed to a script. It is based upon several components. The first of these is building understanding, which is the overarching goal of QtA. When building understanding, it is necessary for an experienced reader to apprentice a less-experienced reader to recognize what information is pertinent to making meaning from the text. QtA has been successfully used with both fiction and non-fiction text. The key to using specific texts is that the students are engaged in discussion, which "takes place in the course of reading the text for the first time so students can share in the experience of learning how to build meaning from a text" (p.29). Throughout these discussions, the teacher is an active participant, but the responsibility for building meaning from the text is placed on the students.

Teachers carefully craft lessons to probe students thinking using queries. Students often assume that authors know their subject without fail, and that the text should make complete sense. Therefore, according to Beck and McKeown, when the text does not make sense students feel the problem is within the reader. However, the authors contend that teachers must guide students to the realization that authors are fallible. For example, when a text is not making sense to students, the teacher may ask, “what might the author have meant to say here?” This query provides students with the opportunity to piece together missing components of the text to build understanding. In order to check for understanding, interspersed reading must become part of the classroom routine. In other words, teachers can model for students how to think through a text as they are reading. This way, students recognize that meaning is built during reading, rather than after the reading is complete.

The book is organized in an extremely user-friendly manner. The first section is composed of five chapters that deal specifically with the nuts and bolts of QtA:

• Chapter 1 – Texts and the Way Students Understand Them
• Chapter 2 – Queries
• Chapter 3 – Planning
• Chapter 4 – Discussion
• Chapter 5 – Implementation

In this era of testing and accountability, it is refreshing to explore a text written for teachers that does not sell itself on what it can do for test scores, but instead on what it can do for students. What do you think the authors mean by what they aren't saying?

Reviewed by Danielle Mathson, a doctoral candidate in literacy education at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She may be contacted at dmathson@utk.edu