3. Method

3.1 Participants

The experiment was run in the context of a third-year undergraduate course in Reading Short Stories at Sheikhbahaee University, and was conducted over a whole semester. The participants involved in this research were 32 undergraduate students (24 females and 8 males) who were all Persian native speakers and were selected from population of senior students majoring in English literature at Sheikhbahaee University on the bases of their GPA.

The participants had already been enrolled for a course entitled “Reading Short Stories”.

The reason for such a selection stemmed from the fact that these participants had passed all the relevant and required courses of reading literary texts (i.e. Introduction to Literature I, Reading Simple Prose Texts and Reading Advanced Prose Texts).Therefore, their post-test scores could better reflect the role of the experiment in their comprehending literary texts.

3.2 Materials

In order to model asking questions while reading literary texts , the following short stories were of the focus of the present study: A Clean Well-lighted Place and Cat in the Rain by Ernest Hemingway, I’m a Fool by Sherwood Anderson, That Evening Sun by William Faulkner and The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen. The students were supposed to have covered the stories at home and write down their formulated questions so that they could report them to the class the following session. These stories were taught throughout 12 weeks using asking questions technique while reading. However, in order to investigate the effect of instruction on improving the ability of participants in asking questions, a total of three Literary texts were used for the purpose. One of the literary texts was selected from short story genre [entitled “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe] whereas the others were chosen from the genre of literary essays entitled “The Effects of Sympathy in the Distress of Others” by Edmund Burke and “The Rewards of Living a Solitary Life” by May Sarton.

The short story “The Cask of Amontillado” is a classic example of the use of an unreliable narrator. Montresor, the narrator of the story, tells his tale of revenge with pleasure, as he invites the reader to appreciate his intelligence. By telling the story from Montresor’s point of view, Poe forces the reader to penetrate into a murderer’s mind. The incentive behind the selection of this story stems from the circumstance that, the reader, on reading this story, is supposed to become quickly aware of the fact that Montresor is not a reliable narrator but tries to convince him/her that his intentions are honorable. In order to grasp this point, the reader should find the link between textual clues of relationship between characters and world knowledge. Accordingly, comprehending the text at issue involves great deal of “scripturally implicit” information, which drastically challenges the reading

comprehension skill of the participants involved in the present study.

Another justification for such a selection is that The Cask of Amontillado is a carefully crafted story so that every detail contributes to a certain unique effect (Womack, 2009). The story is replete with ironies, both verbal and dramatic. It is now widely acknowledged that in dramatic irony the reader perceives something that a character in the story does not (Womack, 2009). Therefore, distinguishing this type of irony requires the reader to link two or more parts of a given paragraph using his/her background knowledge. This causes the text to be full of “textually implicit” information which makes the text under discussion a good candidate for the current research since this may stimulate the participants to ask this kind of

question.

Another important factor in selecting this text is its structural complexity, which paves the way for asking “textually explicit”, “linguistic” and “miscomprehension” questions, which are the types to be investigated in the present research. In summary, all the selected texts had the above-mentioned advantages.

It is noteworthy that all the texts used in the current research were authentic ones, for authenticity is considered an important characteristic of foreign language reading (Govindasamy& David, 2004). As far as the present research is concerned, the concept of authenticity has been borrowed from Wallace (1992, p.145). Wallace defines it as “…

real-life texts, not written for pedagogic purposes”. Authentic texts are therefore written for native speakers and contain real language. They are “… materials that have been produced to fulfil some social purpose in the language community” (Peacock, 1997; p. 2).

The other materials used in this study constituted of two tests, one pre-test and one post test. Both the pre-test and the post test contained forty items testing the literary comprehension of the participants. Twenty test items intended to evaluate the participants’ comprehension skill and the rest was to assess their ability to recognize literary elements in the texts.

3.3 Procedure

At the very beginning of the course, in order to investigate the effect of asking questions while reading at the end of the course, an experimenter-designed test of reading literary texts was assigned to the participants as a pre-test. Then in the following session, the experimenterasked the participants to read the story Rope by Katherine Anne Porter and ask questions that occur to them. This process of asking questions before coming to the class lasted for 12 weeks. The original estimation was that students had no idea what it meant to ask questions.

The experimenter presupposition proved to be true. The questions generated by participants appeared to be, as Janssen (2002, p.97) believes, “inauthentic” in the sense that the questioners already knew the answers themselves. In other words, the questions were similar to the test or display questions asked by teachers and in text books. The following is the introductory paragraph of Rope.

On the third day after they moved to the country he came walking back from the village carrying a basket of groceries and a twenty-four-yard coil of rope. She came out to meet him, wiping her hands on her green smock. Her hair was tumbled, her nose was scarlet with sunburn; he told her that already she looked like a born country woman. His gray flannel shirt stuck to him, his heavy shoes were dusty. She assured him he looked like a rural character in a play. Some of the questions asked by participants were as follow: When did he come walking back

from the village? What was he carrying? How was her hair? What did he tell her?

Therefore, it was arranged to teach participants asking questions techniques while reading. To this end, following Rosenshine et al. (1996) teaching asking questions while reading consumed an estimated 75% of the instructional time. The experimenter modelled the strategies through thinking aloud and the students were asked to apply the learned strategies in small peer groups.

In this connection, considering the time constraint factor, the experimenter prepared the questions before attending the class and formulated the questions on the basis of a question framework. The framework applied in this experiment was that proposed by Dubravac and Dalle (2002) and has been appended in appendix A. In order to investigate the effect of instruction on students’ ability to generate questions, three texts were given to the participants to read and write the questions that come to their mind. Then, the questions were categorized on the basis of Dubravac and Dalle’s (2002) model of question types which has been taken up below. Next, the frequency of each question type was computed. Finally, in order to observe the effect of teaching asking questions while reading, another experimenter-designed reading comprehension test was assigned to the participants

as a post-test.