Grappling with Text Ideas: Questioning the Author

Author(s): Margaret G. McKeown, Isabel L. Beck and M. Jo Worthy

Source: The Reading Teacher, Vol. 46, No. 7, Innovations in Literacy for a Diverse Society
(Apr., 1993), pp. 560-566
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the International Literacy Association
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Margaret G. McKeown_
Isabel L. Beck, & M. Jo Worthy

Grappling with text

ideas: Questioning
the author
Studies we have been involved in over
McKeown is a research scientist at the past 5 years have given us a reveal
ing look at how young readers interact
the University of Pittsburgh's with information from their content area
Learning Research and textbooks (Beck & McKeown, 1990; Beck,
McKeown, & Sinatra, 1990; Beck,
Development Center. Beck is a McKeown, Sinatra, & Loxterman, 1991). Our
professor of education in the School analyses of students' responses to a variety of
texts suggested that much of the time these
of Education and a senior scientist young readers constructed very little meaning
at the Learning Research and from what they read.
One source of the difficulty students have
Development Center at the in constructing meaning is that their textbooks
University of Pittsburgh. Worthy is a often lack coherence and explanation and as
sume unrealistic levels of background knowl
postdoctoral fellow at the University edge?features that have been given the label
of Pittsburgh's Learning Research "inconsiderateness." (For discussions of such
features, see Alvermann & Hynd, 1986;
and Development Center. Currendy Anderson & Armbruster, 1984; Beck,
the authors9 primary interest is in McKeown, & Gromoll, 1989; Dole & Smith,
1989.)
understanding and facilitating Another quality of textbook prose that
students'ability to learn from text. may aggravate the difficulties students have
with textbooks is their neutral, "objective"
style of prose. The language of the textbook
together with its status in the classroom cur
riculum gives it an authority that works to
place it above criticism (Luke, DeCastell, &
Luke, 1983; Olson, 1980).
For many students, inconsiderate features
of a textbook's content inhibit comprehension,
and the textbook's authority causes students to
attribute these difficulties to their own inade

560 The Reading Tfeacher Vol. 46, No. 7 April 1993 ? International Reading Association 0034-0561/93/US$l .25 + .00

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quacies. To avoid blaming themselves, they
may disengage from the reading process. As
Anderson has observed, "students often be
lieve that having a problem in reading is dis
graceful and thus are reluctant to bring their
natural problem-solving abilities to bear"
(1991, p. 2). There is particular risk for
lower-achieving students who become accus
tomed to saving face by applying least ef
fort-not to try is not to fail (see, for example,
Paris, Wasik, & l\irner, 1991).
Indeed, the nature of students' responses
to texts in our studies evidenced students' ten
dency to resist digging in and grappling with
things that do not come easily. In this article
we describe an approach, which we have la
beled Questioning the Author, that is targeted
toward getting young readers to engage with
text-to really consider ideas deeply.
Giving readers a reviser's eye
Deeply engaging with ideas is related to
what we did when we revised textbook
passages for use in our text studies (Beck et
al., 1991). We tried to understand what the
author's goal for the text was and what each
idea was supposed to contribute to that goal,
and then we reformulated that into more co
herent, clearer statements. So it seemed that
engagement could be developed by giving stu
dents a "reviser's eye."
A key to the concept of a reviser's eye
may be the difference between trying to un
derstand and trying to make something under
standable. For example, given the sentence
"In 1753, the British and the colonies ended a
war with the French and Indians," a student
asked to report what the sentence was about
might say: "The British and somebody had a
war." Yet, if the task were to explain it to
someone else so that that person understood
what it was about, the student might dig back
into the text and begin to try to work out who
"somebody" was and who the war was against.
Support for the likelihood of this scenario
can be found in Hayes, Flower, Schriver,
Stratman, and Carey's (1987) work on revis
ing text. According to Hayes et al., when
readers interact with a text in order to make it
understandable to an intended audience, they
take on a more active attitude toward the text,
becoming more responsive to text problems
than if they were reading just for their own
comprehension.
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Our goal is, in essence, to have students
make texts understandable to themselves
which is what mature readers do when they
read. As they meet comprehension obstacles,
competent readers first recognize them as
such and then take steps to repair the prob
lems. The steps readers take to solve problems
have come to be called "reading strategies,"
and a current trend in instructional research is
to teach young students strategies that mature
readers use.
Instruction to teach students to use strate
gies has taken a number of forms, but the
common core might be described as explicitly
labeling the strategies, discussing their pur
pose, teaching them to students, and having
students practice applying them. Presenting
and modeling strategies has provided valuable
scaffolding for students' reading interactions
(Brown & Palincsar, 1989; Duffy et al., 1?87;
Paris, Cross, & Lipson, 1984; Pressley et al.,
1992).
The other side of instruction that uses
strategies to guide student reading, however,
is that the strategies themselves, rather than
the ideas from the text, may become the focus
of the interaction. Students asked to make pre
dictions, for example, may limit their atten
tion to events that can be predicted at certain
points in the text rather than constructing the
sequence of ideas. Indeed, some researchers
have wondered whether emphasis on specific
strategies would be necessary if the goal
of reading as an active search for meaning
were kept in mind (Carver, 1987; Pearson &
Fielding, 1991).
In Questioning the Author, rather than
have students reach for text ideas through a
strategy, we ask them to go directly to the text
ideas. We create an entr?e to text ideas by
guiding students to think of the meaning of a
text as something to be negotiated, as if setting
up a dialogue with the text's author.
Overview of Questioning the Author
The introduction to Questioning the Au
thor that we have developed begins by at
tempting to, in a sense, "depose" the authority
of the textbook through actualizing the pres
ence of an author. We tell students that
"What's in textbooks is just someone's ideas
written down." We allow that authors are falli
ble by suggesting that "different people write
things in different ways, and sometimes text
Grappling with text ideas 561
 books are not written as well or as clearly as
they might be. Sometimes what someone has
in their mind to say just doesn't come through
clearly in their writing of it."
We alert students that because written text
is the product of a fallible author, they may
"need to work to figure out what the ideas are
behind an author's words." In doing so,
we shift the reason for needing active effort
from a reader's inadequacies to the author's
vulnerability.
We then translate the notion of "author as
vulnerable transmitter of ideas" into a goal for
reading by asking the students to read the text
and talk about what ideas the author is trying
to get across and to judge whether the author
has made those ideas clear. As students read,
prompts are offered to keep the focus on seek
ing out and putting together the author's ideas:
What is the author trying to tell you?
Why is the author telling you that?
Is that said clearly?
Asking students to read to search out the
ideas behind an author's words is intended to
motivate them to engage with the text by tak
ing appropriate opportunities to apply their
skills and knowledge to construct meaning.
Reaching for the author's intended ideas can
also help develop an appreciation of the de
mands that texts can make on a reader. En
couraging students to judge the author's
success in making ideas clear frees them to
find confusions and difficulties in the text
without having to view them as failures of
their own comprehension. This notion may be
especially liberating for those lower-achieving
students who have assumed themselves to be
the cause of the problems they encounter in
constructing meaning from textbooks.
As students discover problems and confu
sions in the text, they are prompted to recast
those ideas in clearer language:
How could the author have said the ideas
in a clearer way?
What would you want to say instead?
Recasting the author's ideas offers stu
dents a concrete way to experience the key of
successful comprehension, transforming an
author's ideas into a reader's ideas. Asking
students to revise an unclear text requires
them to grapple with its problems. In order to
explain or clarify text content, students need
to inspect what they know, organize it, and if
562 The Reading Teacher Vol. 46, No. 7 April 1993
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necessary fill in information. That is, they go
through the processes readers need to do for
themselves to make sense of a complex text.
Thus, asking students to revise texts may up
grade the chances that they actually engage in
the processes required for skilled reading.
Engaging students in questioning
We are still in the process of developing
Questioning the Author. In the course of its
development, we have introduced the ap
proach to individual intermediate grade stu
dents representing a range of background and
ability, and more recently we have tried it out
in a fourth-grade classroom in a school that
serves a low income, minority population.
During these interactions we observed
students' initial reluctance to take on the au
thor. In fact, one student responded to the no
tion of books not being "written clearly" by
telling us that he had once gotten a text in
which the printing was "all blurred." But, as
instruction proceeded, students' conception of
clarity readily focused on ideas, and we were
impressed with their willingness and even ex
citement in identifying the distance between
the words and the apparent ideas.
Students' introduction to Questioning the
Author involved setting forth the idea of texts
as "merely someone's words" which may or
may not be clearly written, followed by our
demonstrating a Questioning the Author ori
entation to text. In the demonstration, we
asked students to follow along as we read a
brief text and modeled our interaction with it.
The text, which was about Russia's launching
of the first satellite into space, began as fol
lows.
A Russian Traveler. The day is Friday, October 4.
The year is 1957. People in many parts of the earth
turned on radios and heard strange news. "Russia
has used rockets to put a new moon in the sky," said
one station.
At this point in the text, the investigator ex
pressed puzzlement over putting "a new moon
in the sky" saying, "Hmm.. .1 don't know what
the author means. How can you put up another
moon?"
The issue of confusion about "a new
moon" persists with the next segment:
The tiny new moon is a metal ball. It has a radio in
it. The radio goes 'beep! beep! beep!' as the moon
travels along.
The investigator commented, "I don't
know what the author is trying to tell me
about.. .how can a metal ball with a radio in it
be a moon?"
An opportunity to clarify the new moon
issue and to make a point about the author's
assumption about students' background
knowledge arose with the next sentence of the
text:
The new moon is named Sputnik.
The investigator commented about her
own background knowledge and the author's
lack of insight about the background of the in
tended audience: "OHH, now I know?you
might not know this, since it was a long time
before you were born; but I remember that the
first Russian satellite was Sputnik! That's what
this is all about-that's the 'moon'-a satellite
in space! I think the author could have said
that in a clearer way because kids are going to
be reading this and they weren't born when
this happened."
The text then stated that "Sputnik is a
word that means 'traveler' in Russian" and
went on to describe the next spaceship that
Russia launched, explaining that:
The ship is just big enough to carry a little dog.
The ship sends out signals about the dog.
At this point the investigator commented
on how this last sentence changed her inter
pretation of what the author was trying to say
about the space ship: "Oh! There is a dog on
the spaceship! I thought they just meant that's
what size it was?big enough for a dog!" After
more description of the dog's role in space, the
text concluded with the sentence:
Everywhere people became interested in rockets
and spaceships.
The investigator commented on the dis
connection of the final sentence to the pre
vious sentence and then made a hypothesis
about the author's intent in writing the sen
tence: "This last sentence seems like a big
jump from talking about the dog. I guess
maybe the author is trying to connect the sen
tence up with the beginning about people all
over the world turning on their radios."
Asked to give their comments about the
Russian Traveler text, students often chimed
in that they, too, were confused about how you
could send up a new moon, and how a moon
could be a metal ball. In the classroom tryout
with this text, discussion culminated in a re
vised version of the text sentences describing
the "new moon" as follows:
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Russia has used rockets to put a satellite into space.
The tiny satellite is shaped like a metal ball.
After students' introduction to Question
ing the Author, the next several sessions pre
sented passages from content area texts on a
variety of topics and were led by an investiga
tor acting as teacher. The teacher's role in
Questioning the Author is to guide the student
through the text, helping to focus on making
sense of the author's words by using the
prompts discussed earlier:
What's the author trying to say?
Why is the author telling you that?
Is that said clearly?
The teacher keeps the interaction going
by reacting conversationally to the students,
sometimes recapping what the students have
said or reinforcing a student's point, saying
"You're right, that's not very clear, is it?" or "I
think you've got something there." The teacher
also fosters interaction among students, for
example, by asking a student to elaborate an
other student's comment-"William, what do
you think Brent's trying to get at?"-or asking
the class their view of a problem that one stu
dent identified-"What problem did Kim find?
Did anyone else notice that?"
Snapshots of thinking
In the sessions we conducted with stu
dents, we saw them become active partici
pants in constructing meaning from text. The
framework and simple prompts of Question
ing the Author seemed to give students moti
vation to lift the lid off the text and grapple
with the underlying ideas. The following ex
amples provide a snapshot of the kinds of
thinking that the approach engendered in
students.
Questioning how the honey guide gets its
meal. Consider how Jason, a fourth grader,
works his way through a text that describes a
symbiotic relationship between a bird called
the honey guide and a badger. The honey
guide eats beeswax and can locate beehives
but is unable to open them. He teams up with
a honey-eating badger and leads the way to the
hive, which the badger can open. After Jason
had read the text's account of the honey guide
leading the badger to a beehive, the investiga
tor asked him what the author was trying to
say and whether it was clear:
Jason: There's just one thing I can't make sense
[of]. How does the honey guide eat if the honey
badger's getting [the honey]?
Grappling with text ideas 563
 Jason is responding to the text statement
"the badger knows it has almost found its
meal" and he hasn't made the inference that
the honey guide is also about to find its meal,
the beeswax.
Investigator: I think that [how does the honey
guide eat if the badger's getting the honey] would
be a good question for the author. Why don't you
go ahead and read the last part and see what hap
pens there. [As Jason finishes reading]: So what do
you make of this part?
The conclusion of the text states that the
badger "rips [the hive] open and eats the
honey." The honey guide's meal is not men
tioned. Jason responds as follows:
Jason: It doesn't exactly make sense because the
honey guide also needs to eat, and it's leading the
badger to the place and then the badger gets all the
honey and the honey guide never gets any.
Investigator: Hnimrnm, so there's something that
the author hasn't quite included here? What do you
think the author should say at that point?
Jason: Well I don't really know, 'cause I have no
idea how the honey guide eats.
At this point Jason seems unwilling to
take his quest any further, until the investiga
tor makes a suggestion.
Investigator: Can you find anything in the text
where the author's trying to give you that message,
but it wasn't very clear?
Questioning the Author brought about a
kind of openness that allowed students
to articulate difficulties %mth text
statements that might have gone
unnoticed under conditions of less
engaged reading.
Now Jason digs in again and is
able to come up with the point of the animals'
relationship.
Jason: [looking over the text] Oh yeah, I get it! The
honey guide eats the beeswax wh?e the badger eats
the honey.
The tenor of the interaction suggested that
Jason was willing to pursue his confusion
about the text because it was put in terms of an
author's problem?something the author hasn't
564 The Reading Teacher Vol. 46, No. 7 April 1993
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quite included-rather than a situation of be
ing sent back to the text because he couldn't
come up with the right answer.
The confusing status of the honey guide's
meal meant extra work for many of the stu
dents we worked with. One student, after fig
uring out why the badger ate all the honey,
provided a commentary on the text. Armed
with her new insight, she began by evaluating
the text's effectiveness for young readers, and
then offered a suggestion for the author:
It'll take a child a long time to figure out what
they're saying or the teacher will have to tell them
because it's not very clear. [The author] just says
The honey guide is an African bird that likes to eat
beeswax.' He could've said, urn, the reason the
honey guide calls the honey badger is so he can get
the honey and the honey guide can get the, urn,
beeswax.
Questioning how hermit crabs change
their shells. Questioning the Author brought
about a kind of openness that allowed students
to articulate difficulties with text statements
that might have gone unnoticed under condi
tions of less engaged reading. The example
below arose in a small group discussion of a
text on hermit crabs. As the group of three
students moved through the text, the investiga
tor asked if the following sentence was clear:
"As the crab grows, it changes its shell for a
larger one." Michael commented, almost mus
ing to himself: "Maybe it's growing or some
thing. It said it's changing its shell for a larger
one. But do they take it off?"
Notice that in the exchange among the
three students, at first neither the other stu
dents nor the investigator understands that
Michael's confusion stems from his concep
tion that the shell grows with the crab and can
not be taken off. The other students seem to
think Michael wants to know the process by
which crabs get out of their shells.
Nicole: They get them off with their claws.
Terrence: They exchange them.
Investigator: So, what are you saying isn't clear?
Michael: How could they change one shell? I
mean, I thought it stuck to the body.
Nicole: But they get bigger, too.
Michael: I know, but when they grow I thought the
shell grows with them.
At this point, both the investigator and the
other students grasp Michael's issue, and the
conversation takes a more helpful turn. Nicole
goes on to offer an analogy to further put
Michael's issue in perspective, and Terrence
offers a rewrite:
Nicole: It's like people. Do you keep your clothes
on and when you get bigger you break out of them?
Terrence: As the crab grows, the shell breaks and it
exchanges for another. It wants a larger shell as it
gets bigger than it is now.
Michael now joins the discussion, seem
ing to reflect a new understanding of the rela
tionship between a hermit crab and its shell:
Michael: It's like clothes, putting it on.
The issue ends with the three students
agreeing that the author needed to make the
statement about the crab's changing shells
clearer. The discussion put no onus on
Michael for "misunderstanding" the text.
Rather, the situation was treated as an oppor
tunity to refine an idea that the author was try
ing to communicate.
Reactions to Questioning
the Author
In their interactions with Questioning the
Author, students considered what the point of
a text was and how well that point was put
forth by the author, rather than simply search
ing for phrases that answered direct questions
about the content. Our own sense from obser
vations of the sessions and analyses of the
transcripts was that these students were deeply
engaged with the ideas. Moreover, students
who participated in Questioning the Author
sessions seemed more willing to do the extra
work required to make sense of less than clear
ideas because not understanding something
in a text was a reflection of the author's falli
bility rather than a negative reflection of their
abilities.
The fourth-grade teacher in whose class
room we worked responded enthusiastically
after observing the approach, saying that she
was "shocked" at how much thinking some of
her students were doing. She also pointed out
the special benefit for at-risk students, ob
serving that the discussion was being led
mostly by two students who were the lowest
achievers in her class: "I was astonished at the
responses and involvement in the discussion
from some of my students who usually never
participate in class discussions." In particular,
she expressed "amazement" about the thought
ful responses of one student, saying "I never
labeled Edward as a thinker."
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After viewing several videotaped lessons
and seeing the continued participation of these
students, this teacher was convinced that
Questioning the Author showed great poten
tial for helping previously unreachable stu
dents to become engaged in reading and
discussion. "We've talked many times about
how to get these kids involved; we've tried
many things and nothing else has worked."
Plans for Questioning the Author
Our initial interactions in using Question
ing the Author with young students suggest
that it has rich potential as a vehicle for get
ting students engaged with text and working to
solve the problems they encounter. The route
Students who participated in
Questioning the Author sessions seemed
more willing to do the extra work
required to make sense of less than clear
ideas because not understanding
something in a text was a reflection of
the author's fallibility rather than a
negative reflection on their abilities.
we are taking to harness this potential over the
next year is to collaborate with several inter
mediate grade teachers to develop the ap
proach as a way of interacting with texts in the
classroom. In developing Questioning the Au
thor for classroom use we will focus on hav
ing students approach their regular materials
in social studies and reading/language arts by
actualizing the presence of an author, under
standing the author as a fallible transmitter of
ideas, and working to transform author's ideas
into readers' ideas.
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Call for papers for The Reading

Teacher on literacy in the content areas
As children discover the world around them, they come to understand how they can use literacy to make sense of
things and communicate their understanding to others. In the development of literacy, is there a distinction between
"learning to read and write" and "reading and writing to learn"? For decades, this question has been a catalyst for
debate. Will it still be germane for the next century? Will the traditional definitions of "process" and "content" still be
appropriate? What criteria should teachers use in deciding how to balance the teaching of process and content? If
elementary school children experience a shift from learning to read to reading to learn, when should this occur? What
role should technology play? What are the effective ways of organizing curriculum to foster literacy learning across
the content areas?
As teachers, we find that these questions warrant our attention and capture our imagination. As guest editors of the
April 1994 themed issue of The Reading Teacher, we invite manuscripts addressing "Literacy in the Content Areas:
Definitions and Decisions for the 21st Century." We invite authors to explore the philosophical and pragmatic impli
cations of these questions. Readers would enjoy reflective articles on teaching and learning practices as well as
innovative models for curriculum and instruction. Authors should submit double-spaced manuscripts of not more
than 5,000 words, in triplicate, to either of the guest editors-authors outside North America may submit just one
doublespaced copy. Enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope for return correspondence?authors outside the U.S.
submit just a self-addressed envelope. (Manuscripts cannot be returned.) Submissions will be reviewed by a guest
editorial board of teachers from the Boston area. Deadline for submissions is June 1,1993.

Mich?le M. Pahl, Wheelock College, 200 The Riverway, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Robert J. Monson, Superintendent, Westwood Public Schools, 660 High Street, Westwood, MA 02090, USA

566 The Reading Tbacher Vol. 46, No. 7 April 1993

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