Tough Questions: What does this question make me wonder about?.Aha Moment: How might this change things?.Contrasts and Contradictions: Why would the character act (feel) this way?.Beers and Probst have developed one anchor question for each signpost. We want students to develop reading habits and behaviors.
Students must take ownership of these questions. To develop independent readers, the students must have a repertoire of a few useful questions which they apply while reading any text.
The feature offers something to readers who notice and then reflect on it to help them better understand their own response, their own reading experience, and their own interpretation of the text.The feature is evident across the majority of books.The feature must be noticeable, having some characteristic that causes it to stand out from the surrounding text.In the book Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading, Kylene Beers and Robert E Probst identify additional text features, signposts, that help students read literary texts with deeper understanding. These signposts represent what students are to do as they read, notice something in the text and then stop to note what it might mean. As students learn to notice these signposts there is an increase in their use of comprehension processes: visualizing, predicting, summarizing, clarifying, questioning, inferring, and making connections. Traditionally we teach students about text features such as the importance of titles, characters’ names, setting, and the opening lines.