The Use of Questions in the Teaching of High‐risk Beginning Readers: A Profile of a Developing Reading Recovery Teacher

This interpretive case study was designed to describe the development of a Reading Recovery teacher's understanding and use of effective questioning practices for low‐progress first‐grade readers. Videotapes of the Reading Recovery teacher tutoring a child who was one of the lowest achieving students in a first‐grade urban school district, were collected after 3, 6, and 8 weeks of instruction. Each videotape was analyzed in two ways. First, three experts trained in Reading Recovery analyzed teacher‐student conversations to determine the nature and type of the teacher's comments, prompts, and questions and the relationships between the teacher's talk and the student's behavior. Second, the teacher and researcher discussed each lesson while viewing the videotapes to determine the teacher's reasoning processes for each question or comment. The analyses revealed shifts in the teacher's learning, and relationships between the teacher's and student's learning. The results suggest that teachers’ awareness of their own interactive behaviors is developed through ongoing, deliberate reflection and discussion with others and that this awareness is related to student learning.