Challenging Questions in the Literature Classroom

Many treatments of teacher questioning in reading and literature have defined teacher questioning as a cognitive process. Emanating from a reading comprehension perspective, this view of questioning argues that asking a variety of higher level questions will lead students from literal to more inferential levels of text understanding. Approaches to literature teachiag based solely on taxonomies or reading levels, however, may not be entirely appropriate for explaining what happens when readers understand and interpret literary, as opposed to non-literary texts.