Figure 7.16. Circles of Implementation of ELA/Literacy and ELD InstructionMeaning Making
Meaning making at grades nine and ten is critically important
for students as they deploy their language and literacy skills
to understand, interpret, and create text in ELA and all other
subjects. Text complexity increases at these grades as students
read Shakespeare and other works of world literature for the
first time as well as textbooks and other sources in history/
social studies, biology, health, and geometry. The standards at
these grades expect students to question more and consider the
impact of authors’ choices of language and text structure.
For some students, grades nine and ten may be the first
time they consider that a content area text may not represent
indisputable truth or that literary text can be interrogated for
its choices in presentation and ideas. The concept of the author
as an imperfect individual may not have occurred to students
before this time. Questioning the Author (QtA) (Beck, and others 1997; Beck and McKeown 2006)
was designed to help students interact with texts to build meaning and has at its center the notion
that authors are fallible. In QtA teachers guide students in dialogic discussion that goes beyond
superficial understandings of the text. Teachers plan carefully by reading the text closely, segmenting
it for discussion purposes, and developing queries. Queries are distinguished from questions in
several ways: they are designed to assist students in grappling with text ideas rather to assess their
comprehension; they facilitate group discussion rather than evaluate individual student responses to
teacher’s questions; and they are used during initial reading rather than before or after reading. Types
of queries include initiating queries, follow-up queries, and narrative queries. Examples of queries for
each follow in figure 7.17.
724 | Chapter 7 Grades 9 and 10