The Comprehending, Asking, Responding To WH ?s in Early and Elementary Language (CARTWHEEL) Program is designed for students in grades PK-2 who have difficulties comprehending, answering, and asking WH questions.
Children master most question forms before their fourth birthday, allowing them to both ask and answer WH questions about their immediate surroundings and familiar events (Diehm, E.A., and Abou-Dahech, T., 2019). Understanding and using WH questions significantly impacts a studentās ability to succeed academically. Students at all grade levels are expected to ask and answer WH questions for various reasons, including to clarify a text, to gather additional information, or to deepen understanding (Diehm, E.A., and Abou-Dahech, T., 2019).
CARTWHEEL uses metalinguistic instruction, and developmental organization of question types to facilitate comprehension, answering, and asking of wh-questions. The instructions for each wh-question type simplify the question into strategized steps with accompanying icons for visual support. Each question type has a set of receptive and expressive questions with the same syntactic structure to provide targeted practice.
Both components of the CARTWHEEL program, the answering and asking wh questions, are divided into three levels of complexity: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Each level targets different semantic, morphological, and syntactic structures. Graphic and linguistic stimuli were designed specifically for each stage of complexity. The beginner level uses simple, short sentences while the intermediate level uses sentences that increase in length and morphosyntactic complexity. The advanced level uses sentences that are of high complexity, such as questions with embedded clauses and past tense. The asking component of the program is focused on teaching the syntactic structures of wh questions.
When/How do I take a language sample?
When:
A language sample is available to be used at any time. However, it is recommended to be used at the beginning and end of each level of the Answering Questions Section. There are 3 levels of wh-questions within the Answering Questions section of the program: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced.
How:
Explain to the students what is expected during the Language Sample: āWe are going to tell a story, and ask and answer questions while we look at this picture book together. Weāll try our best to say something about each page.ā
There are two wordless picture books. The first is available to model telling a story, asking, and answering questions with a wordless picture book, if necessary.
The student will use the second book to tell a story, ask questions, and answer questions on each page as the educator flips through the pages for them.
Give nonspecific feedback or prompting if necessary. Try not to provide hints as to whether the student is right or wrong. This is to be used for benchmarking to see studentsā independent abilities.
What is the order of wh-questions targeted?
The wh-questions program hierarchy order (developmental order) is shown below and applies to both components of the program, Answering and Asking wh questions.
Beginner WH-Questions | Intermediate WH-Questions | Advanced |
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What do I do for each activity of the lesson cycle?
Step 1: Direct Instructions
Introduce the topic of the activity.
Skill instructions can be repeated and revisited as frequently as the student requires.
Modify, model, and prompt as much as necessary to support the student.
Step 2: Exercises
Exercises can be directly presented on the educatorās device or assigned to the student to be completed on their device.
The educator can emphasize and use the prompts that are most effective for each student and model as much as necessary during the activity.
Data is collected only when the activity is assigned to the student.