In examining the technique of questioning currently used in our schools, one reading expert offered the following critique:

What is a real question? Real questions connect. School questions are often artificial. The teacher asks the question, the student's job is to answer, but the teacher knows the right answer. It's a game. A real question is one where the questioner is genuinely interested in learning something from someone else...The essence of real discourse is unpredictability and authenticity (Calfee & Patrick 1995, p. 62).
And in a guide designed to help teachers improve classroom questions, an expert on questioning made the following pronouncement:

Questions are one of the major instructional strategies teachers use throughout the year.....teachers ask 50 questions per period, or 350 per day. However that frequency in questions indicates that the questions are fact-based and allow little opportunity for higher-level thinking or application" (Chuska 1995, p. 14).
The two issues addressed in both these excerpts, that questioning is a critical element in the teaching / learning process, and that questions that teachers ask often tend to be cognitively unstimulating, are the reasons I am devoting this module to the discussion of questioning techniques that inspire student writing.
QUESTIONING AS CRITICAL TO TEACHING AND LEARNING
Indeed questioning techniques often serve as the touchstone for identifying excellence in teaching. One educator (Ruddell 1999), proposed a classification of teachers as "influential" or "uninfluential" based on their ability to facilitate critical thinking in their classrooms inspired by the quality of the questions they asked. Researchers also categorize questions based on their potential to stimulate thought and promote understanding. For example, Heath distinguishes between contextualized and decontextualized questions placing them at opposite ends of the learning continuum, with the former--questions situated within the contextual parameters of the text--identified as more thought-provoking than the latter, questions lifted superficially from the text (Heath 1983). Similarly Rosenblatt promotes the value of "aesthetic" questioning, an approach which grants students the opportunity to experience text in a meaningful and personal way, as opposed to "efferent" questioning, which teaches them only to extract factual, surface level information from text (Rosenblatt 1991).

QUESTIONING AS A COGNITIVELY UNSTIMLUATING PROCESS
As suggested above, education critics complain that the mode of questioning typically found throughout school, and in particular in classrooms heavily populated by linguistically and culturally diverse students--is rigid, uninspired, and based on an outdated factory-model style. Tierney & Pearson (1981) contend that students' interactions with narrative text are often "sabotaged by an excessive use of poorly fitting questions e.g. detail questions dealing with trivial information under the guise of skill objectives" (ibid. p. 866), while Darling-Hammond (1985) decries the minimal skills and literal comprehension that students are continually saddled with instead of exposure to higher levels of thinking. Similarly, other researchers call for the kind of comprehension questions that would "help provoke students' thought and not merely force them to recall data," (Calfee & Patrick 1995, p.150),
Ironically, as an instructional technique, questioning has received significant attention in the research literature on reading comprehension. Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956), the seminal work on critical thinking, contributed multiple levels of questioning to the field, and spawned various analyses and conceptions of questioning. His proposed taxonomy made a distinction between inferential thinking,
problem solving, elaboration, representation, application, synthesis, analysis and evaluation at the higher end of the questioning hierarchy, and basic recall and recognition at the lower end. In recent years, as a further development, teaching students to generate their own questions during reading has developed as a sound approach to teaching reading comprehension. Strategies such as "questioning-the-author" (Beck, Mc Keown, Hamilton & Kucan, 1997), "reciprocal teaching" (Palinscar & Brown, 1984), "transactional strategies instruction" (Brown, Pressley, et al. 1996), and other self-questioning techniques (Paris, Wixson, & Palinscar, 1986), all carry this important component in their line-up of "how to" instructions. Unfortunately, however, many of these techniques are formulated specifically for content area reading (we discuss these and other strategies further in Module 5). In the wake of the activity in this sub-area, narrative questioning has largely remained relegated to the questions generated in the teacher's head following the reading of a story or novel, or to those prescribed at the end of the text in some cases.
Such questions, and others that teachers "think up" to accompany the reading of stories, are often the kind of effete, lower-order thinking questions of memory and recall discussed above, rather than the more complex, interpretive, evaluative and critical thinking higher-order questions that Bloom proposed, and that are admittedly more cognitively stimulating (Rickford 1999, 2001). In what follows, I will propose an heuristic for teachers to build on in preparing questions for their students following the reading of a narrative or novel, that will provide them with a tool for constructing comprehension questions which are embedded in the structure of texts and connected to the elements they wish to examine. Moreover, teachers will learn how to create questions that are strategically designed to promote an understanding of the texts that their students read.

STRATEGIES FOR DESIGNING SOLID QUESTIONS
In designing good questions for students to consider based on the novels or stories they read, and in order to promote quality interaction with texts, teachers should be mindful of three factors:
Factor 1: Questions should include in their scope both higher-order, critical thinking, and lower-order, memory types with an emphasis on higher-order questions as "real-world" and "workplace" prototypes.
Factor 2: Questions should be labeled where possible to ensure focus, purposefulness, and clarity.
Factor 3: Questions should be integrated within the structure of the text to facilitate interconnection with its narrative elements and continuity of knowledge in understanding the text.
Factor 1 and Factor 2
In terms of the first factor, teachers could generate questions under four categories--General Questions (Table 1), Recall Questions (Table 2), Interpretive Questions (Table 3), and Creative Questions (Table 4). General Questions refer to the type of question that asks students to give a "gut" reaction to the text they have read, that is to say whether they like it or not, and to say why, an important first step in trying to understand the story or novel. Recall Questions refer to the conventional kind of closed question, whose answer could be lifted superficially from the text, usually a factoid or literal piece of information provided there. Interpretive Questions and Creative Questions are flexible and open-ended, and would generate the kind of critical thinking which is the landmark of higher-order skills. Under the umbrella of Interpretive questions would also fall all questions requiring thought, inference, deduction or reasoning, and those questions would be entitled as such--Inference Question, Problem-Solving Question, Deductive Reasoning Question, Creative Reading question, and so on (Rickford, 1999).
Exemplars of these broader question categories as well as specific question types are provided below in Tables 1 through 4, using the same story from Module 3: "The Woman and the Tree Children."

Factor 3
In terms of the third factor, teachers could find a seamless connection between the intellectual endeavor of question construction and the practical exercise of narrative structural analysis (see the preceding Module 3) as a catalyst for understanding stories. Revisiting the framework of narrative structures, they could devise a strategy for interconnecting narrative text structure and question design.
For example, they could ask General and Recall questions based on every story or novel that students read. However, they might find that some of the Interpretive and Creative questions seem to find a natural "fit" in one or other of the four narrative structures demonstrated in Module 3. For instance, teachers think that the "Character Weave" would be a natural source for a "Favorite Character Question" or a "Character Qualities Question," that is, a question asking students to pick a favorite character from the story or novel, then give reasons for the selection. Or they could ask students to identify the physical or emotional traits of a character. Similarly, teachers think that the information gleaned from the story in building a "Story Graph" could be harnessed to question students about a constellation of narrative features, ranging from the development of the plot, to the sequence of events or the change in the emotional status of an individual. Therefore, based on this structure, they might ask a "Plot Development Question" or another critical thinking "Inference Question" or an "Inductive Reasoning Question" such as "Why did X feel that way (sad, happy etc.) after Y did or said that? Give reasons for your answer." We discussed how important it was to teach students to articulate reasons for their thinking.
Since the "Episodic Analysis Chart" contains so many "mini-stories", there are opportunities here for questions of a wide range including more "Interpretive Questions" or "Problem-Solving Questions" of the kind defined above, or "Creative Reading Questions" that in some way ask students to relate the story to their own world and/or circumstances. Finally, like the "Episodic Analysis Chart," the "Conceptual Map" is comprehensive enough to justify a question from any of the four categories outlined above. Since the theme or "main idea" of the story is identified here and tends to be a moral or good lesson in popular novels and didactic narratives, teachers believe that this would be the right source for a question about the moral make-up of novel or story characters. This structure could therefore be devoted to "Moral Judgment Questions."

Researchers have found that schools structure inequality by offering access to higher forms of knowledge (including selective kinds of questions) to students in the more advanced classes (Oakes, 1985). Oakes received widely differing responses from high-track and low-track English high school students who were asked the question, "What is the most important thing you have learned [in class]?" The high-track English student responded:

I have learned to form my own opinion on situations. I have also learned to not be swayed so much by another person's opinion but to look at both opinions with an open mind. I know now that to have a good solid opinion on a subject I must have facts to support my opinion. Decisions in later life will probably be made much easier because of this.

Following is the response that the low-track student gave:

I have learned about many things like having good manners, respecting other people, and not talking when the teacher is talking.

It is my hope that the questioning techniques outlined in this module will have the effect of bridging the gap between these two responses by providing students in alternative school settings with the knowledge and skills they need to develop critical thinking strategies and negotiate the world successfully. Teachers can help their students achieve this goal by stimulating the cognitive processes vital to their success. They must look beyond the predictability and confinement of traditional questions, to a more applied and real-world conception of learning.

SAMPLE OF QUESTIONS BASED ON FOUR CATEGORIES FOR WRITING ABOUT NARRATIVES

Table 1: General Question Category

General Question

On a scale of 1 to 6, rate how much you like this story. Explain your answer.

General Question

People sometimes like stories because they like what the story is about (its theme), or they like one or more of the people in the story (its characters), or they like the way the story unfolds (its plot), or they like the place in which it was set (its setting) or they like the way it was written (the wording). People also dislike stories for some of the same reasons. Explain why you like or do not like this story.

Table 2: Literal Meaning Question Category

Literal Meaning Question	Why did the old woman think she had lived an unhappy life?
Literal Meaning Question	What happened one day that made the woman yell at the children?
Inference Question	Where do you think the children went to when the woman returned home the second time and found the house empty? Give reasons for your answer.

Table 3: Interpretive Reading and Critical Evaluation Question Category

Moral Judgment Question	Was it right or wrong for the woman to lose her temper and scream at the children? Give a reason for your answer.
Favorite Character Question	Who is your favorite character in the whole story? a) the medicine man, b) the old woman, c) the tree children.Explain why you like this character.
Character Feelings/Qualities Question	How do you think the children felt after the old woman got angry and told them she could not expect any better from them because they were nothing but "children of the tree"? Circle three of the qualities that best describe how they felt, and explain your answer.SAD WANTED HUNGRY BETRAYED ANGRY HAPPY DIRTY ALONE COMFORTABLE LOVED CLEAN UNWANTED
Deductive Reasoning Question	Early in the story the medicine man made the woman choose between a husband and children. Later, after the children went away and she went back to him, he said he could not help her. Why do you think he said so?

Problem Solving Question	How would you treat your tree children if you were the old woman in the story? Write about what you would say to them or do with them after they broke your special dish.
Student-As-Author Question	The end of the story goes: "And she lived in sadness for the rest of her life" (p.3). How would you end the story if you were the author and had a chance to write a different ending?

Table 4: Creative Reading Question Category