Investigating the Use of Student-Generated Questions in Disciplinary Reading Practices in Higher Education Environments

Abstract

The paper sets out to explore the issue of students’ strategic ability of learning from disciplinary texts in tertiary education settings. While performing reading tasks, students acquire or restructure subject-area knowledge as well as improving conceptual resources and literacy skills indispensable for their academic attainment. The so-called reciprocal reading instruction promotes the adoption of a procedure in which students are required to generate their own text-based questions, then ask and answer them in pairs. The exploratory case study reported in this paper aimed to examine the performance of advanced Polish students of English during ten reciprocal reading sessions, part of a subject-specific course. The analysis of the collected data focused on selected aspects of the students’ question-generating behaviour. Additionally, the data obtained from a semi-structured interview were scrutinized in order to find out how the students evaluated their task performance. The paper finishes with a discussion of the implications of the study for the use of student-generated questions and reciprocal reading tasks in enhancing disciplinary knowledge and academic literacy skills.

Text-based Student Questioning in EFL Settings: Long-term Strategy Implementation in Reciprocal Reading Tasks and Its Perception

“…As shown in Table 1, 89.4% of all the questions generated during the strategy training sessions and 96.2% asked in the delayed sessions fulfilled the criterion related to the clarity of questions. These findings are consistent with those the researchers obtained from their previous study investigating the use of the strategy of generating readers' own questions in reciprocal reading instruction at academic level (Chodkiewicz & Kiszczak, 2019). With regard to the second research question, the findings revealed that at the beginning of the study the participants struggled with posing linguistically correct questions.…”

“…Such a view can be supported with reference to the results obtained in both the training and practice sessions, with explicit explanation and guidance provided by the teacher, and in the delayed sessions, when the students worked independently using the already practiced procedure. Generally, with the appropriately chosen difficulty level of content-area texts, as also shown by the results of this study and in Chodkiewicz and Kiszczak (2019), EFL students are capable of asking questions relevant to the content of texts, answerable and clear to the recipient, which undeniably shows that having understood the texts students are able to effectively address the text content in their questions.…”

“…Of some problem for English language learners, as it has been demonstrated even at an advanced language proficiency level, is to formulate linguistically correct questions (cf. Miciano, 2004aMiciano, , 2004bDorchandra, 2013;Chodkiewicz & Kiszczak, 2019). However, the current study has also revealed that the number of linguistically appropriate questions tended to increase as a result of the amount of practice the students completed.…”

“…This study is an expansion of the authors' research on the use of the strategy of students' generated questions in support of the enhancement of academic reading skills and acquisition of disciplinary knowledge in EFL settings (cf. Chodkiewicz & Kiszczak, 2019). It was a small-scale classroom-based study which involved a group of undergraduate English Studies students in performing a sequence of reciprocal reading tasks which served the purpose of training and practice in the use of the strategy of student text-based questioning.…”

“…The taxonomy of questions adopted in this study was developed by consulting a number of classifications of questions developed in relevant literature (Graesser & Person, 1994;Taboada & Guthrie, 2006;Taboada, et al, 2012). Its suitability for the present study's objectives and clarity for the study participants was checked by piloting it (see Chodkiewicz & Kiszczak, 2019). Taking into account the cognitive difficulty of the questions, their form and content, the questions were classified into five types, that is, factual information, description, explanation, pattern of relationships, and judgmental questions.…”