Questioning the Author: English Language Teachers’ Perspectives

Abstract

Questioning the Author (QtA) is an approach used to teach reading comprehension. Americans Beck and McKeown tried it out in the 1990s and found it to be effective in getting children to discuss what the author had to say about the text they were reading. This paper focuses on a study conducted in a non-western country. It involved teachers in a particular Singaporean primary school who were introduced to QtA, a teaching tool which they were not familiar with. This paper discusses the responses of the first batch of these teachers in that school who tried out QtA with their classes. The transcripts of their interviews and their written reflections show that once they had undergone the lesson planning and practice sessions, and the actual teaching of QtA lessons, their approach to teaching reading comprehension changed. The change also came about because the teacher-participants saw the benefits QtA had on their students who came from multilingual backgrounds. This study shows that QtA can work for countries in the East too, that teachers’ mind-set can be changed with time and professional support.