Reflection: Asking questions about texts

Brief description

This is a group exercise, possibly combined with individual work. Students must reflect on a number of questions about syllabus texts. The students must discuss why the questions are well or not so well suited to open, understand, and analyse a text. The purpose of the exercise is to make the students aware of how to analyse theoretical texts academically and gives them an opportunity to reflect on academic writing styles.

Motivation for the exercise and required outcome

The exercise will teach the students how to use key study tools focusing on text analysis; it is also useful for improving text comprehension and for learning how to ask relevant questions about texts. Using this exercise, you may set up a framework for the students which enables them to learn how to identify and formulate relevant questions that will help them understand, process and analyse texts.

Performing the exercise

You must prepare a number of different open-ended and closed-ended questions about the text set for the students to work with during the class session.
Divide the students into groups and distribute the question among them or show them in a Power Point slide.
Ask the students to select three questions. In the groups the students should discuss why they chose these three questions and not the others. They should also discuss why these are good questions and how they may open the text for comprehension and analysis.
The students then move on to answering the questions in the group.
Finally, you should ask the students to make individual summaries in coherent body text of their responses from the group work — preferably including references to and quotes from the text.
You can follow up on the activity in several ways:

You may ask the two groups to present their selected questions to each other, including their reasons and answers, and to discuss in each group any differences and similarities.
Each group can present their choice of questions and their reasons for this in a plenary session. Subsequently, they may discuss the options of the different questions with the entire class.

Variation options:

You may add variation as to who formulates the questions and how by letting the exercise span across several teaching session. During the first weeks you present the students with three questions formulated by you. Then you make a large pool of questions which will prompt a discussion as to how different formulations of questions offer different opportunities to access a text. At the end of the semester, following repeated discussions of questions about texts, the students may formulate the questions themselves.
You may switch between group work and individual writing in order to promote the students’ collaboration skills and individual writing proficiency.
You may focus more on academic writing skills by letting the students read each other's responses, providing feedback and weeding out colloquialisms and non-academic expressions.

Worth considering:

Will you use he exercise in one session only or as a recurring exercise throughout the entire semester?
How will you divide the students into groups? If you use the exercise several times, you may want to divide the students into different groups in order for them to receive different input.
Should the exercise be supplemented by a presentation by you about the skill of asking questions and about academic argumentation? Or should the students themselves search for information about academic argumentation at Studypedia, for instance?

A question exercise for opening and analysing texts

Here is a concrete example of how a teacher has used the activity in practice.

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Revised 23.11.2023

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