Metacomprehension Abilities in Students of Teaching: Question Making

Having on mind the existence of crises and recurrent projects for the education laws renewal, the making of diagnoses about students’ and teachers’ problems, among other issues, is imperative. In order to make a contribution in this sense, a team of researchers led by professor Elvira Arnoux at Linguistics Institute, in Buenos Aires University, has designed and administrated a reading survey and a test on comprehension and metacomprehension in a postsecondary education level, which has been the research problem of a few studies: students at teachers training institutes for initial, primary and secondary schools in the province of Buenos Aires (Argentina). In the present article that test is introduced; the findings mainly exposed are the ones of the section on metacomprehension, focused in this case on question making –one of the fundamental components of the learning of reading strategies. The analysis reveals that the ones who are to become teachers have low metacognitive competence, knowledge illusion and serious difficulties to state questions on a written text, questions which go beyond the resolution of lexical problems. Some possible reading instruction characteristics, these future teachers will develop, are inferred from this diagnose.