‘One reads in order to ask questions’ - The art of asking questions in the literature class

 

• ‘Sir, what does that story mean?’
• ‘Sir, I don’t get it, why is he doing that in the book?’
• ‘Tell me Mary, what’s the colour of the dog in the story?’
• ‘John, why do you think the dog is of that colour?’
• ‘Jan, if you were the main character, would you react this way, or that way? – and why?’

As teachers, we spend many hours asking questions – and yes, many hours giving answers, too, and many hours explaining, contextualising, deconstructing…and constructing.

But ‘Asking questions’ is a bit of a vague expression really, when you consider that not all questions are identical. More importantly, the type of question you ask will give you back a certain type of answer. And the answer you have will not be an answer to everything – it might not even be the Answer, much less the-answer-you-wanted-to-hear.

Of course, before even asking fitting questions, it’s important to keep in mind a couple of typical diseases we teachers often suffer from.

For example, and it is one I suffer from massively myself, in my eagerness to leave some mystery (or more charitably, to leave some interpretive room), I formulate questions that cannot be answered, or which answers are not illuminating in the way I want them to be: ‘Ah, but if you think about John’s reaction, and Mary’s reaction, what could you say?’. That’s too open, too vague, and not helpful.

Another disease – the opposite one, as it were – is to ask a question that restricts the expression of a learner, typically expressed with a leading question: ‘How important do you think she is in his development?’. Yet another is to ask something esoteric and way above the head of most learners, as well as (usually) containing another question in itself: ‘Why do you think the use of the balloon is symbolic?’.

But by far the most lethal disease when it comes to literature in class is that of formulating questions, get an answer and move on to the next question. Not only does it reduce the class to one individual, it also conveys the idea that all questions are equal, and all have but one task: eliciting ONE answer, discovering THE ONE truth, solving the mystery of meaning.

Now, it is reasonable to ask whether the above is entirely true, and in fact, while I do believe it to be true, it’s also the case that there are exceptions – and those exceptions are linked to the type of questions one can ask.

Broadly speaking then, there are three types of questions we should use in class (I mean the literature class, I make no claim for anything else, even if such a typology would seem applicable to other subjects):

Factual
Interpretive
Evaluative
There is a fourth, the Follow-up question, but that is less a type of target-specific elicitation, and more a pedagogical approach: it is a most important, most crucial one though, and one we must not forget, whichever type of question we’re busy with. Asking follow-up questions is essential to the literature class.

But back to our three main types.

The Factual question is quite simply needed to elicit information from the text that a cursory reading might not have revealed (or, more often, an inexperienced one), such information being essential in formulating interpretations later. A typical factual question is: ‘Who is the narrator of The Hunger Games?’. Those questions elicit an awareness of characterisation, setting, situation and the like – all very important even if in themselves, none of those elements are enough.

A factual question has, typically, just one answer, which is why the rule above (Thou shall always ask a follow-up question) is not always applicable here. After all, there is but one narrator (Katniss), and so only one possible answer. Yet you will find that when it comes to fleshing out details, even factual questions need follow-up questions: ‘Where do they live?’ should be followed by ‘What type of place/community is it?’, and of course, always followed by ‘How do you know? Which details in the text tell you that?’.

An interpretive question is the second step: ‘What could be the reason Katniss doesn’t kill John?’. Such a question can (and should) lead to different answers, essentially because there is no absolutely right or wrong answer. She could have spared his life because she loves him, because she needs his help, because two is stronger than one, because she wants to exchange him for someone else, because she has a good heart, because he’s weak and pitiful. In short, an interpretive question is one that elicits possible interpretations: possible reasons why something is like that, why someone acts like that.

This is an important step obviously, as we strive towards generating possible meanings, i.e. different interpretations.

Finally, the evaluative question is the one that asks the reader what they think of the interpretation: ‘Do you understand why she spared him? What would you do, and why?’. In fact, evaluative questions also take such form as Who is your favourite character in The Hunger Games?, except that those need to land at the end of a process to be truly meaningful. If they start the discussion, they can only be a reader-response strategy aimed at breaking the ice…and then you’ve got to take the other steps in reverse (i.e. ask factual and interpretive questions afterwards).

Evaluative questions are crucial in that most readers want to say what they think, how they feel about it all. Yet often, they want to do so without having considered alternative interpretations, possible other meanings than their own – and that is precisely the role of a teacher: to help hold back judgement, to allow for a multiplicity of possibilities, to enable exchange and growth.

That is why it’s so important to go through the stage of asking interpretive question, otherwise readers will only see what they already know, and will likely come to hasty conclusions based solely on what they already think.

But literature should be used to think new thoughts, see other perspectives, smell other smells and see other sights. ‘One reads’, as Kafka noted, ‘to ask questions’, and not to be comforted in one’s necessarily narrow vision (‘necessarily’ because we are all the product of uncountable social and historical forces, as well as being heavily contextualised beings). Kafka added that ‘A book must break the frozen ice within us’: we can read this ‘frozen ice’ here as that mass of opinions, habits and first-time reactions we all have when we read - the rather unthinking kind if we're honest.

The task of a teacher, then, is to wield that axe little by little, step by step, question by question. It is also to understand how those three types of questions interact and support one another, while remaining distinct because eliciting very different types of answers.

It is therefore not enough to ‘ask questions’: it is necessary to know which type to ask, when, how and what for – something that is ultimately linked to your goals and your knowledge of the text.

 

Kafka in Alberto Manguel: A history of reading. London: Penguin, 1997 (might well be apocryphal 😊)