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How to Actually Teach Reading Comprehension: WH Questions

Today I’m starting a brand new series right here on the blog…because…I think we could ALL benefit. It’s all about the area of reading comprehension and, as educators, we are often really good at providing lots of practice in this area, but, in honesty, it’s a really difficult area to teach.  What often happens is we throw lots of passages at our students and then pummel them with tasks such as WH questions, finding the main idea, summarizing, and sequencing. When we stop and look at the progress for our students, it can be very minimal and we wonder why they just aren’t getting it.

In this series, I’m going to show you some ways I actually teach these skills, not just practice them. In my examples here, the pages are taken from my Leveled Intervention: Reading Comprehension which you could buy HERE but you can also create your own intervention from it. This is by far not the only way to teach them but my goal is provide some ideas you can take back to your students tomorrow and use. And…just in case you needed this reminder: these skills are complex and are not taught in 1 or even 2 thirty minute sessions. They take time, especially for our students who have delays in language, and that is okay.

For this first post, I’m covering a mammoth of a topic, WH Questions. It’s so large I’m splitting it into 2 parts:

  1. Teaching WH Questions and
  2. Teaching how to answer them in text.

Part One: Teaching WH Questions 

Here’s where I begin, especially with my little ones. Before introducing questions from text, they need to have a good foundation, things like what a question is and looks like, what words indicate a question (who, what, where, when, why, how) and how these can be answered.

  • Before we begin anything, we break down exactly what a question is and what an answer is. What do these two things do (their purpose), what do they look like, and how we can identify each one. Before we go any further, my students are required to verbalize what these two things are. If they can’t put into words what they are, they won’t be able to apply them in their reading.

  • Next, we break down the questions based on type and do a lot of teaching as to what each question represents. (who requires a “person” answer, where requires a “place” answer, and so on).

  • There are many resources you can buy or make to teach these specific types of WH Questions and get this point across. However, something I would add here is ensuring you present and teach specific and multiple types of answers for each question. For example, we can’t just teach “who” questions are answered with a “person” and stop there because our students need to know exactly what a person looks like in text (it can look like a name “Lucy” or an occupation “teacher”). A “when” question is yes a “time,” but that could look like a specific time (5:00), a specific date (April 14th), or contain sequencing words (before lunch, after the show). My point here is that our students, especially our students with language delays, need direct and explicit teaching, with plenty of examples shown.

  • To further teach this concept, you could implement an activity where, when given a question word (“what”), students need to search for and identify all the possible answers that go with that question word. This could be made into a fun detective game!

Part Two: Teaching Questions in Text

Just like math, language does build on skills. It’s essential that students have a good grasp on part one before moving on to part two.

  • When I feel my students are ready to start moving into the realm of text and passages, I begin by teaching how to answer a question correctly. The way I teach it is that they must repeat part of the question for it to be answered correctly. I’m a stickler and realize not everyone does this but I do feel it helps reinforce the correct answer by providing a sort of answer “check.” You can see in the examples (answering The story is about a girl named Mable” instead of just answering “Mable”), the repetition of the question itself helps reinforce the answer the student is looking for is a person. You can practice this by providing one word answers and answers that are thorough and see if students can identify which answer is better.

  • You might think at this point we’re finally ready to start answering questions in text (I promise, we almost are!) But there is one more skill I like to practice before we do and that is the ability to locate information in the text that is also in the answer. I’ll often provide a passage and give a handful of different highlighters to my students. I’ll highlight some key information in a question and then ask them to use the same color of highlighter to find those same words in the passage. For example, in the passage below, students are asked to locate and highlight the words “tiny fairy” in the first question, “Gabriella live” in the second question and so on. This activity gets them use to ensuring their answer is correct (or at least within the same realm of the question).

  • Once students are comfortable doing this, they are ready to start answering questions from text. For my students, I teach them that in order for it to be correct, they need to be able to justify their answer  from evidence in the text and repeat some of the question in their answer.

After we practice answering questions, something fun I like to do with my students is switch roles. I provide a passage and they become the teacher, coming up with questions from it for me to answer.  Because working on correctly answering questions includes the flip side of working on correctly asking questions.

I hope this gave you some ideas and a sort of hierarchy go from when teaching WH Questions. Like I said, it can be taught multiple ways but it’s important to be consistent, concrete, and visual.

If you’d like to purchase this resource, click below (available in both a printed version and a No Print version)

Leveled Intervention for Reading Comprehension (Printed Version)

Leveled Intervention for Reading Comprehension (No Print Version)

Leveled Intervention for Reading Comprehension Bundle (Printed and No Versions)

If you like this series, please let me know (I depend on your feedback to guide the topics I write about) and consider pinning the image below!

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Comments

  1. Hi Nicole!

    This blog series is EXACTLY what I need! I’ve been so worried about just “practicing” reading comprehension and seeing no results. I am super excited to begin teaching Wh questions in this systematic way to assist with reading comprehension.

    I cannot wait for the next post in this series!

    Reply

  3. Hi Nicole!
    Love your blog post on how to teach reading comprehension. Do you sell the materials you that are shown?

    Thank you,
    Alysa

    Reply

  4. Hi Nicole!
    Love your blog post on how to teach reading comprehension. Do you sell the materials that are shown?

    Thank you,
    Alysa

    Reply

  7. This was very helpful! As a CF this year, I had this question at the beginning of the year and now feel like I have the tools to effectively teach this important skill. Thank you Allison!

    Reply

  11. Are the materials above located on TPT? Right now I am overwhelmed and don’t have time to recreate it. I looked up your name and put in wh-questions, but the only related item was a receptive language pack. Is that what contains these pages? Love the materials I have already purchased from your site!!

    Reply

  12. I found this post very informative! I am going to change the way I approach WH questions. Thanks so much!

    Reply

  16. Having read this I thought it was very informative. I appreciate you spending some
    time and energy to put this content together. I once again find myself spending a
    lot of time both reading and posting comments. But so what, it
    was still worthwhile!

    Reply

  18. After I originally commented I appear to have clicked on the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and from now on whenever a comment is added I recieve 4 emails
    with the exact same comment. Perhaps there is an easy method you can remove me from that service?
    Cheers!

    Reply

  19. Hello Nicole,
    I appreciate the way you comprised your lesson on the WH questions.
    Is this lesson for sale? If so, my struggling learners would benefit from this lesson.

    Reply

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