Who? Where? What? When? Why? How? Question words – What do they mean?

Abstract

Accessible summary This paper is about: A teaching program to help people with learning disabilities to understand the meanings of the question wordswho, where, what, when, why and how. Part of a research project which used question words to improve understanding about what is being read. Teaching the meanings of question words to help learners with disabilities to understand what is being read. This programme will show teachers how to help learners with disabilities to understand the meanings of question words. This research is important for learners with disabilities because understanding the meanings of question words will help them to: understand what is being read; answer questions; complete assessments; communicate with others; remember about past experiences and things already known and to tell others about personal experiences and what is being read. Summary An action research investigation into the use of specific reading comprehension strategies with a group of six young adults with Down syndrome revealed a previously undocumented finding in the area of reading comprehension. This was a uniform deficit among the participants to understand the meanings of question words. This deficit was shown to have negative implications on literacy learning and assessment. For example, it affected their responses to strategic questioning; responses on assessments; maintenance of coherent, responsive dialogue; recall of prior knowledge, past experiences and texts; construction of meaning and their ability to retell. An intervention that focussed on the development of understanding the meanings of the question wordswho, where, what, when, why and howand the application of such understanding specifically in reading comprehension, was successfully implemented and is the focus of this paper. The findings suggest that the meanings of Question words should be taught prior to using questioning as a teaching strategy, and before administering assessments that require the learners to answer questions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.