Follow-up questions

Follow-up questions have different roles to play, but however you use them, they remain crucial in your process of generating interpretations, broadening the discussion, and in forcing readers to substantiate their answers - they must not only say what they think but why they think it. In so doing, they will have to consider alternative possibilities, thereby refining their own meanings and ideas while reflecting on their own thinking.

Another important role follow-up questions have is in communicating clearly to learners that a text does not have one answer, and that the interpretative process does not consist in simply asking one question - giving one answer and then moving on. Discussing ideas is not a mechanical process where each question only has one answer. 

Take Mary having married someone; if to your interpretive question 'Why did she marry him?' a learner answers 'Because she felt lonely', a follow-up question is to ask 'How do you know she felt lonely?', or even 'In what way marrying him would relieve that loneliness then?', or of course 'Is that common for people to do?'. Another follow-up question could equally be : 'If she marries out of loneliness, does that mean she doesn't love her husband?'. 

Obviously, these are just examples - we could think of many more follow-up questions to ask. The point is to ask them, to not let learners think that 'having an idea' is enough in itself: it's only a start for you, as you want them to consider why they're thinking what they are thinking, how else could someone think about it, what other reasons/causes could be at play.

Finally, a general follow-up question you should keep in mind and ask regularly is simply: 'Why do you think so/say so/claim that?, or 'What in the text (e.g. characters, situations, context, previous events) makes you interpret it that way?'.