Procedure:
- After reading a story, an article, or a whole book, the class is divided into groups of two. The group’s assignment is to develop questions about the content and the central argument of the text for the other students. Their questions should fall into the three following categories:
- Questions that can be looked up. The answers to these questions are contained in the text. They are mostly clear-cut (e.g. can be answered with “correct” or “false” or with a precise indication).
- Questions about comprehension. These questions can only be answered upon reflecting more deeply about the content. It requires a little “reading between the lines”. The answers to these are often not entirely unambiguous. (Example: how did the person feel? Why did s/he act in this way?)
- Questions for reflection. The questions that fall into this category go beyond the content per se. Generally, there are no “correct” solutions, requiring that students discuss the responses together. (Example: what are the consequences of the end of the story? How could this conflict have been resolved in other ways?)
- Upon elaborating on the questions, the students hand them in to the teacher. The teacher then distributes the questions to the teams for answering, or the questions are discussed/resolved by the whole class.
- The differentiation between different types of questions must previously be discussed and elaborated with examples. The questions for reflection should, in any case, be discussed in the plenary, as there are often no clear answers.
Remarks:
- With mostly heterogeneous age groups in HLT, it would be preferable to conduct the exercise based on three level-appropriate different texts. It would be good if all had the same topic (although it is not critically important) e.g., fairy tales from our country of origin, life in the migration, racism, geography, etc.
- The classification of the questions into three categories derive from the educational materials “the strong language performers” and should be familiar to most students. For students with a (still) minimal language competence, the questions can be reduced to two types (questions that can be looked up and questions about comprehension).