This paper is part of a three year longitudinal intervention study (in press, Reichenberg, 2008) where 10 poor male comprehenders – five in experimental groups and five in control groups are subject to a further analysis. The students attended grade 4 at the beginning of the study and they could decode adequately well but they had difficulties to understand what they read because they had a passive approach when reading. i.e. they lacked or failed to activate reading comprehension strategies to access information in textual material and, typically, did not monitor and evaluate their understanding of text (Torgesen, 1982).

The overall aim of this paper was to evaluate a new approach of comprehension instruction, Questioning the Author (QtA), and to investigate to what extent and in what way– if any – QtA (Beck et al. 1996) change over time teachers´ and students´ interaction with expository texts. The following more specific research questions- three base line issues and the critical issue of the intervention effect- were focused on: (a) What types of questions do teachers regularly ask when reading expository texts in the classroom under typical or regular classroom conditions? (b) How do students regularly respond to these questions? (c) What strategies do the teachers typically and regularly use to get the students to interact actively with the text while reading? (d) Can structured text talks change over time: teachers´ question types, students´ answers, teachers´ and students´ strategies and poor comprehenders´ partici¬pa¬tion in text talks? QtA is inspired by Vygotsky (1962) and his zone of proximal development. The results demonstrated that during the regular lessons, most of the teachers asked purely factual questions where the students just had to retrieve information directly from the text to be able to answer them. The students made few inferences, i.e. read between and beyond the lines, and few reflections. None initiated own questions when reading or questioned the author behind the text. After the regular lessons, the teachers were invited to participate in seminars led by the investigator. In these seminars, structured text talks (QtA) was practised before videotaping. Then there were new seminars, new videotaping etc.

Over the three years the communication patterns were changed in the experimental groups. The number of purely factual questions decreased. Instead there was an increase in the number of open-ended questions and inference questions. This was not the case in the control groups. The male poor comprehenders made more inferences and reflections. Furthermore they initiated own questions when reading and questioned the author on several occasions. This was not the case in the control groups. Key words: Poor comprehenders; Reading comprehension; Reading strategies; Structured text talks;