This article by Ventures author Sylvia Ramirez was first printed in the TESOL Materials Writers Interest Section Newsletter, August 19, 2015. Sylvia looks at text dependent questions and how these can be used as a tool for teachers with students focusing on college and career readiness.
Accelerating adult ELs’ college and career readiness requires a new perspective on the texts and tools that teachers and materials writers use. The College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education, 2013 [DOE, OVAE]) embed this perspective in the three English language arts instructional advances—navigating text complexity and its academic language, extracting and citing evidence from text, and building knowledge from rich informational text.
(For more on the research underpinning these advances, see pages 9–10 in the College and Career Readiness [CCR] Standards) While the CCR Standards do not address the support adult ELs need, many teachers welcome the news that changes in instruction can increase their learners’ college and career readiness. However, subject matter experts, materials writers, and classroom teachers alike have noted that support is needed integrating these skills into their curriculum and differentiating their delivery.
Research shows that 80–90% of Common Core State Standards reading standards require text-dependent analysis, yet over 30% of questions in major textbooks do not.(DOE, OVAE, 2013)This article focuses on the reasons for and the use of questions that are text dependent and concludes with an illustrative example of how one teacher employs these types of questions.
Text Dependent Questions (TDQs)
To address the more rigorous and interconnected instructional advances of the CCR Standards, teachers are examining their practices and materials, and requesting new materials that include strategies and tools to help them make important content and conceptual changes. One tool teachers and materials writers can employ toward this end is the text dependent question (TDQ).
TDQs deepen learners’ knowledge of text and help them demonstrate higher-level thinking. They are designed to be “questions worth answering.” These types of questions:
can only be answered by referring explicitly back to the text being read; do not rely exclusively on background information; and make the text the “the expert in the room.”
Initially, teachers and materials writers need to review existing questions to identify whether they are text dependent or not text dependent questions (NTDQs). The chart below provides examples of how to revise NTDQs into TDQs.
The questions in the right hand column allow learners to have a rich and more rigorous conversation using evidence from the text to support their answers. Of course, there is a place for NTDQs in EL curriculum. We know these kinds of questions allow our learners to share experiences and state opinions related to those experiences. However, to meet the new CCR Standards, these types of questions should account for a smaller portion of the lesson time.
Before reviewing a text’s existing TDQs, the first step is to examine the text and identify the key ideas the author wants learners to take away from the text. These key ideas become the basis for the review, enhancement, and creation of TDQs. Next it’s important to examine the types of questions that are asked and their purpose in developing deeper textual connections. The article Engaging the Adolescent Learner (Fisher & Frey, 2012) suggests six categories of TDQs:
general understandings
key details
vocabulary and text structure
author’s purpose
inferences
opinions, arguments and intertextual connections
There is no requirement to use all six categories of questions in one lesson. The first three categories can be asked at all levels and need to be part of any set of questions to ensure ELs’ comprehension. It’s also important to check that the questions are coherently sequenced. The Checklist for Evaluating Questions to Ensure Text Dependence (adapted from Fisher and Frey by Adelson-Goldstein, Howard, & Ramirez, 2012, and featured in a CCRS-TDQ wiki) can assist teachers and materials writers in the TDQ review process.
A Classroom Example
The time frame needed to practice and acquire college and career readiness skills makes it imperative that these skills be integrated into adult EL curriculum from the very beginning (Parrish & Johnson, 2010). With that in mind, the following classroom example highlights a beginning level teacher’s TDQ review process.
Several learners in our beginning-level teacher’s class recently asked questions about drones they’d seen in the park. For this reason, he selects an adapted article about drones to help build his learners’ knowledge about the topic and provide practice with complex text. He determines that the text is appropriately complex and identifies the gist and key vocabulary.
Our teacher then crafts five questions to check learners’ comprehension, carefully reviewing each question by asking, “Do learners have to refer to or reread the article to find the answer to this question?”
For questions two and five, that answer is “yes.” For one, three, and four, however, the answer is “no.” Armed with this information, our teacher sets out to tweak the questions, ensuring that learners will go back to the text to locate the evidence that supports their answers. Here are the tweaks he employs.
Tweak A: Direct learners to the general location of the information. (The column, the paragraph, the line.)
Question 1. What is a drone? is a key detail and a vocabulary question. In this case, the vocabulary is specifically defined within the text. To be sure that learners use the text as the expert, our teacher rephrases the question to read:
Look at paragraph 1. Underline the words that help you answer this question: What are drones?
Tweak B: Have learners locate and highlight the vocabulary word or phrase. (Circle, underline, highlight.)
Question 3. Why are drones an “eye in the sky?” is an important vocabulary question that helps learners deepen their understanding of the issue being addressed in the article. Because of the way the question is written, learners may access their cell phones or electronic dictionaries to locate the meaning of each word in the phrase and miss the meaning of the phrase within the context of the article. The revision focuses learners on the phrase in the article:
Underline eye in the sky. What does eye in the sky mean in the article?
Tweak C: Have learners look at the information around the word to help them determine the meaning from the context as best they can.
Question 4: Does ban mean the same as stop? is also a question about key vocabulary. It suffers from the same issue as question 3 above—it does not require the learner to focus on the text. With Tweak C, our teacher changes the question to direct learners’ attention to the new word in context.
Reread paragraph 4. Underline what the National Park service said in 2014. Circle the words banned and ban. What does ban mean?
Tweak D: Remind learners to reread a section or the article.
Note that even though Question 2 (Why did the National Park Service ban drones) is already a TDQ, adding the location of the information is very beneficial for beginning-level learners. Our teacher knows that he can also help his learners by identifying how many reasons they should underline
Reread the last paragraph. Underline 2 reasons for the ban on low-flying drones.
In order to scaffold learners’ understanding, he moves this question to follow the vocabulary questions 3 and 4.
Question 5. asks about the main idea and draws learners’ attention to the insights in the article. The question requires learners to review the text to find the answer, so there is no need to edit this question.
The teacher now has five TDQs that require his learners to reread the article and deepen their understanding of the public’s concerns about drones. The five revised and resequenced questions are:
By using carefully crafted TDQs, teachers and materials writers enrich the texts and exercises with which they’re already familiar or develop new materials that require textual evidence. In addition, by developing robust TDQs to assist learners at all levels of language proficiency navigate complexity, learners gain confidence in their ability to understand, discuss, and write about complex ideas from the beginning and, perhaps most important, learners practice the type of thinking required in postsecondary education and the 21st-century workplace.
For more ideas on ways to revise and create TDQs for beginning and intermediate level learners, see TDQ Support: Questions, Frames and Prompts (Compiled by Adelson-Goldstein, Howard, & Ramirez, 2012).
References
Adelson-Goldstein, J., Howard, L. and Ramirez,S. (2012) Checklist for Evaluating Questions to Ensure Text Dependence (adapted from Fisher and Frey). Retrieved from http://ccrstdq.pbworks.com
Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012). Engaging the adolescent learner: Text-dependent questions. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Parrish, B., & Johnson, K. (2010). Promoting learner transitions to postsecondary education and work: Developing academic readiness skills from the beginning(Network Brief). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Retrieved from https://lincs.ed.gov/professional-development/resource-collections/profile-418
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education. (2013). College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education.Washington, DC: Author.
Sylvia G. Ramirez is a Professor Emeritus at MiraCosta College, a teacher educator, writer, consultant, and the recipient of the Hayward Award for excellence in education, honoring her teaching and professional activities. She is a coauthor of Ventures, from Cambridge University Press.