Interact with Authors: The Effect of Questioning the Author on the Recall, Inference Generation, and Comprehension of EFL Junior High School

[[abstract]]The study aims to investigate the effects of Questioning the Author on the reading comprehension of junior high school students in Taiwan. The participants were sixty-two ninth graders from two classes in one junior high school in Taipei city. One class consisting of thirty-one students formed an experimental group, receiving the Questioning the Author training while the other class, comprised of thirty-one students, was a control group provided with the traditional teacher-lecture lesson. “Questioning the Author” is a teaching strategy that encourages readers to engage with the text and construct their own ideas. Teachers use queries to highlight important information, deal with confusing ideas, invite deep thinking and model thinking process in a classroom discussion. With more idea-sharing, students learn to understand and comprehend better. The training period of Questioning the Author lasted for five weeks. Each group was presented two classes per week. “Written recall” and “Short-answer comprehension questions” were used as measures one week before and after the intervention to detect participants’ reading comprehension. “Written recall” was used to see how well subjects could retell the story and how many inferences they drew while reading. “Short-answer comprehension questions” was employed to find whether Questioning the Author was beneficial for subjects to answer factual, interpretive or responsive questions. ANCOVA analyses were applied to observe the effect on recall, inference generation and three types of questions. The Experimental Group took a questionnaire to trace their perception toward the training. The results of the study were: (1) there was no significant difference on participants’ written recall. The Experimental Group did not recall more than the Control Group; (2) concerning reader-based inference, the Experimental Group reached a significant difference. The Questioning the Author lesson was helpful in making more reader-based inferences; (3) regarding interpretive questions, a significant difference was found between the Experimental Group and the Control Group, though there was no difference in factual and responsive questions; (4) the Experimental Group expressed positive attitudes toward the training and desired more Questioning the Author lessons. Based on the findings, it is suggested that Questioning the Author, different from the traditional method, can be applied in Taiwan English-learning classrooms to lead EFL learners in Taiwan to construct meaning of the text by incorporating personal thinking or background knowledge and further to develop avid lifelong readers with independent thinking ability.