Text Dependent Questions. Text dependent questions may be used to guide students into close reading. By using references such as Bloom’s, we can intentionally and purposefully create questions that target specified cognitive levels and rigor, thus supporting and necessitating close reading. Further, when we model this for our students, they can then take the lead in cooperatively creating questions for use with collaborative reading activities or interactive strategy activities.
Levels of text-dependent questions:
o Knowledge questions: What is the main idea? Who? When? Where? How? Just the facts.
o Comprehension: Demonstrate understanding by organizing, comparing, translating, describing or giving main ideas and concepts.
o Application: Solve problems to new situations and find the knowledge needed and facts to support and apply rules in a different way.
o Analysis: Examine and break into parts, identify causes and inferences, and find evidence.
o Evaluation: Present and defend, judgments, validity of ideas, quality based upon criteria.
o Create: Compile it in a different way, new pattern, or alternate solutions.
Teachers need to keep in mind that ELs need to be matched appropriately with texts in order to do close reading. For example, if students don’t have enough background knowledge about the topic or do not know the vocabulary or the sentence structures in the text, then they will not be able to comprehend it, no matter how CLOSELY they read the text.
Teachers can provide appropriate scaffolding for this activity for ELs at different ELD levels. The point is that ELLs should be challenged and exposed to complex texts—texts that are just a bit beyond their instructional level in the zone of proximal development—and complex cognitive tasks.