BHS 9th Grade ELA

Writing Text Dependent Questions

Considerations for Educators ……………………………… • Utilize the sentence stems to support writing text dependent questions for your specific text. • Use the text dependent questions for structured classroom discussion prior to writing a response as a short exit task or a more expanded task like a paragraph or essay. • Use the text dependent question progression as a support to expand discussion around complexity of a text. • The progression of the text dependent questions supports teaching more than one standard at a time. • Good quality questions are important to spawn deep discussions that lead to writing. Progression of Text Dependent Questions

The question stems on the following pages are samples of the types of questions that require students to revisit and use information in a text. There are sample questions for each Utah Core Standard, sorted by category (Key Ideas and Details, Craft and Structure, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas). The resource was curated from text specific examples in the book Text Dependent Questions, by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher. These questions should be used as a starting point to generate text dependent questions related to the specific text students are reading. Keep in mind that text type drives the type of key details readers are seeking. Therefore, questions must be chosen based on each specific text and are not one size fits all. Some general understandings require surface level inferencing. Two examples are listed below: • In Winnie the Pooh, Rabbit doesn’t want pooh to come over. The author does not explicitly say why but does list many things that Pooh eats. The reader must infer that Rabbit doesn’t want Pooh to come over because he eats everything. This is a surface level inference about Pooh that is a key detail important to general understanding. Although the reader must infer at the surface level, why Rabbit doesn’t want Pooh to come over, is a still a level one question related to key details and general understandings. • In the poem Bats by Randall Jarrell, the question “How does the mother bat use her sense of sound” is a level 3 (Integration of Knowledge and ideas) question. The author does not specifically tell us how mother bat uses her sense of sound. The author says “she survives by hearing”. The reader must find the information before and after this line to infer how her sense of hearing helps her survive.

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