Applying Question-Answer Relationships to Pictures

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

Students are questioned about the words in a text on a daily basis, but what about the images? Pictures can help increase students' understanding of the text, topic, or story. In this multisession lesson designed for struggling readers, students are guided through a viewing of David Wiesner’s Tuesday, a wordless picture book. As students view the images, they are asked four different types of questions about the pictures. The questions range in difficulty from those with answers that can be found in the text to those that require inferences. Students learn to categorize questions by the four question types and use pictures to help them better understand a story. Students then apply what they learned to an independent reading of Istvan Banyai's Zoom. Students complete a worksheet with a series of questions about the story and then reflect on the usefulness of the questioning strategy.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

P-QARs for Zoom: Students can use this worksheet to classify question types and respond to questions about pictures in a wordless book.

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Cortese, E.E. (2003). The application of Question–Answer Relationship strategies to pictures. The Reading Teacher, 57(4), 374–380.

• Pictures can be used with question–answer relationships (QARs) as a way to teach students how to use pictorial images, in addition to the printed text, to answer comprehension questions.
  
  
• Engaging students in different levels of questioning in relationship to pictures can help them to identify main ideas, make inferences, and draw conclusions.
  
  
• Applying the QAR strategy to pictures may help to increase students' schema and background knowledge needed to comprehend the text.

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