READING AND QUESTIONING IN CONTENT AREA LESSONS

This paper reports the results of an analysis of 12 fourth-grade science and social studies lessons in which a textbook was used as a focus of instruction. The purpose was to determine how the textbook was used by teachers and students and, in particular, what kinds of questions the teachers asked during the textbook-based lessons. The results replicate and extend several findings from previous research. First, even when textbooks were used during instruction, students did not do very much reading, and the reading they did was round robin oral reading. Second, the teachers asked a large number of questions. Third, very few of these questions came from textbooks; rather, the teachers made up about 90% of their own questions. Finally, only about one-fourth of the questions asked were about the text segments currently being read and, of those questions, text explicit questions outnumbered text implicit questions two to one. Also of interest were the large number of question repetitions and rhetorical questions (questions that did not appear to elicit a response). © 1991, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.