Learning to read is not an automatic process that is carried out as a consequence of the simple action of decoding graphic

elements, but an interactive process between the reader and the text that involves the participation of various levels of

cognitive complexity that intervene by integrating graphic, semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and interpretative information,

which requires teaching methodologies that encourage the active participation of the reader and the implementation of a

series of cognitive actions. However, and contrary to this postulate, the general tendency in many cases to facilitate

reading comprehension skills in the classroom focuses on the response to a series of questions after reading the texts. The

aim of this study is to find out whether proposals that promote cognitive operations aimed at extracting the relevant

information from the text together with the formulation of questions of different types (literal, inferential, reorganizing,

and critical) improve the comprehension capacity of expository texts in students who complete the primary education

interacts with the text through his or her own knowledge.

From this perspective, the process of reading requires an

active intervention by the reader to act on the text in order

to achieve a coherent meaning, so it is considered as a

highly complex action in which the reader, through the text,

reconstructs meaning by involving his or her cognitive

schemas. This construction of meaning involves a series of

cognitive operations (inference, prediction, synthesis,

comparison, etc.). In this sense, it follows that reading is a

strategic act directed by an intention that regulates the

sentences, and paragraphs, understanding the information

being read, identifying propositions, and monitoring the

effectiveness of comprehension itself.

However, learning to read is not only a means of accessing

knowledge through textual information but also a skill for

developing the ability to learn and think (Norris and

Phillips, 2009; Solé, 2012; Yang, 2017), which is only

achieved when the reader participates in situations that

require them to go beyond the text and enter into its

analysis and interpretation. However, it is noteworthy that,

the lower levels of thinking through different questions of

a literal nature, with a few proposals aimed at promoting

thinking skills and the integration of information from the

In textbooks, it is also very common to pose questions at

the end of the reading in order to help students remember

certain information, although not all of them present the

same degree of complexity. There is agreement in the

scientific literature on the differentiation of three main

types of questions (Goldman & Duran, 1998; Gutiérrez-

interpretation of the text, are associated with deeper

comprehension; and the critical questions, which require

evaluating the information in the text in a more personal

way. Along with answering these types of questions, which

is a useful practice for improving reading ability, an

effective strategy for improving reading comprehension is

to encourage students to ask questions about the textual

content (National Reading Panel, 2000). The ability to

formulate questions is a strategy of great interest to

promote comprehension (Hoyos & Gallego, 2017), given

2017; Kintsch, 1998; Solé, 2018).

Different research has pointed out that the strategy of

generating questions by both primary (Cohen, 1983),

secondary (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), and university

students favors the comprehension process(Miyake &

Norman, 1979). Learning to ask questions with explicit

answers and questions that require implicit information has

also been found to contribute to improved reading

processes carried out by the reader to understand the textual

content more efficiently; among the main ones is the

macro-rule of suppression or omission by which the reader

suppresses unnecessary information to interpret what

ticket office and bought a ticket to see the football match

generalization by which the concrete characteristics of a

the other hand, involves the creation of a new concept from

textual information, which does not necessarily have to be

The improvement of comprehension skills through the

formulation of questions is a strategy that has been studied

before and has demonstrated its effectiveness as a very

useful resource for the improvement of reading; however,

no studies have been carried out on the effectiveness of the

textual information, can increase the improvement of

comprehension skills. To this end, we compare the degree

of reading comprehension in two samples of students aged

between 11 and 12 years: one who receives intervention in

the development of the ability to formulate questions and

apply the macro-rules to resume short narrative texts, and

another who exercises reading comprehension by means of

the traditional method present in textbooks, such as

they have finished reading them. The hypothesis is that

students who receive instruction in the skills of question

formulation and the application of macro-rules will

perform better in the process of reading comprehension.

corrected collectively in class under the guidance of the

teacher.

Tables 1, 2, and 3 show the scores obtained by means of a

the pretest for the ACL-5, PROLEC-R and ESCOLA tests

similarly, Tables 4, 5, and 6 show the results obtained in

experimental groups before starting the intervention

program in any of the variables know. However, Tables 4,

5, and 6 show statistically significant differences in the

variables of literal, inferential, and critical comprehension,

in the comprehension of grammatical structures, in

planning, monitoring, and evaluation, with improvements

in the group that participated in the intervention program.

findings are consistent with those of other authors (De Mier

et al., 2015; Solé, 2018), who advocate for the strategy of

generating questions as a valuable resource in classroom

practice for improving comprehension skills. One of the

explanations for this situation may be that when readers

focus their cognitive resources on unraveling relevant

information through the application of macro-rules, they

need to know and integrate the information they read by

relating the content of various sections of the text.

capacity for self-regulation of learning by demanding the

In this study, the findings are consistent with previous

research that emphasizes the importance of question

generation for improving reading comprehension

(Gutiérrez, 2016; Solé, 2014).

With regard to the development of metacognitive reading

skills, the improvements obtained by the participants in the

aforementioned strategies in textual comprehension, both

in planning, monitoring, and evaluating throughout the

reading process.

improving the reading process (Gutiérrez & Díez, 2017).

different textual typologies. One limitation of this study is

that no follow-up evaluation was carried out to assess

whether the results are maintained over time, so one