Generally speaking, self-questioning in reading has been investigated from different theoretical angles. As the literature indicates, most self-questioning studies while reading published since 1992 show positive treatment effects on students’ reading comprehension. In this connection, Frances and Eckart (1992) using narrative and expository texts, employed reciprocal teaching of reading strategies to teach reading skill to grade 7 students. At the end of the course, the researchers noticed that reciprocal teaching group scored higher on reading comprehension than did the control group.
By the same token, Lederer (2000) taught self-questioning techniques to 4-6 grade students.
After this experiment, a post-test revealed that using self-questioning techniques helped the students to improve their reading comprehension skill.
Nevertheless, some self-questioning studies showed mixed results. For example, Alfassi (1998) taught self-questioning strategies in reading expository texts to high school poor comprehenders. The post-test indicated that experimental group outperformed the control group on experimenter-developed comprehension test. However, no effects were found on standardized reading tests.
In a nutshell, self-questioning instruction seems to be an effective approach to improve students’ text comprehension. However, the majority of the self-questioning studies in the literature just focus on the effect of self-questioning strategy during different reading comprehension tasks. Rarely do they deal with the how of the teaching of self-questioning techniques. Furthermore, the emphasis of the majority of the studies is teaching self-questioning techniques while reading non-literary texts. Thus, the current study attempts to focus on teaching self-questioning strategy while reading literary texts. Since as Janssen (2002; p.99) claims reading fiction or literature involves different reading goals, such as “pleasure, aesthetic experiences and understanding”; therefore, different self-questioning techniques may be involved while reading literary texts.
Another drawback of the above-mentioned studies is that they do not follow a particular model in systematic teaching of self-questioning strategy while reading. In this respect, Janssen (2002) asserts that if questioning texts plays an important role in critical understanding, it is implied that students need access to instruction in generating questions to improve their understanding of written texts. Considering these facts, this study set out to investigate the effect of teaching self-questioning technique while reading literary texts. To this end the Dubravac and Dalle’s (2002) model of question types has been employed. According to Dubravac and Dalle (2002), many of the differences in question types seem to be related to the quality and quantity of online inferences. An inference is generated when a reader uses both his or her background and linguistic knowledge. In view of the fact that the answer to the questions asked by the students requires background knowledge or linguistic knowledge, Dubravac and Dalle (2002) have classified questions into five categories. The first question type introduced by Dubravac and Dalle (2002) are “scripturally implicit” questions which require the greatest amount of available background knowledge in order to answer. In other words, these questions (e.g. what is the theme of the story? or why has the
author narrated the story?) require an answer that is not in the text. In order to answer these questions, the reader should be cognizant of textual clues which show the relationships between characters, as well as textual clues which show the relationship between the text and other world situations. The second question type embraces “textually implicit” questions and, while relying on less background knowledge than scripturally implicit questions, still maintains a certain amount of inference. In other words, these questions require the reader to link two parts of a given paragraph using their background knowledge The third question type is “textually explicit”, which demands little, if any, background knowledge and whose answer can be easily found in the text. The fourth type of question is “the linguistic question”, which typically includes questions pertaining to the syntactic or semantic traits of the text such as “what does x mean?”, “what does x have to do with anything?” or “Does it mean what I think it does?” These questions often seem to show failure to comprehend the text and the subject himself/herself understands that s/he has a problem in understanding it. Using this model of question types, the researcher, intends to investigate whether or not teaching students to ask questions while reading literary texts can improvetheir comprehension.