How do we read?

“An essential part of active reading is responding to what you are reading....”　(http://www.open.ac.uk/skillsforstudy/reading-critically.php) Good readers read stories and/or essays critically. In other words, they constantly ask questions while they read.
One aspect of English reading classes is to raise good readers. Good readers would be able to ask questions by themselves. The question is how to help intermediate students develop their ability to read critically, to read asking good questions.
As English language teachers ask appropriate questions to students, the students develop their ability to ask good questions themselves. The teachers must ask students good questions such as those good readers ask themselves. Then, what are good questions?
Good questions are those to connect the bottom-up reading and the top-down reading. The bottom-up reading itself does not necessarily lead to the understanding of the contents a text has, and it just gives us grammatical information. The top-down reading does not necessarily lead to the understanding of the contents either, but it only gives us back-ground information. We need to read critically to understand the contents; to link the bottom-up reading and the top-down reading. Thus we can link the grammatical information and the background information to the understanding of contents. In classes, English teachers should ask appropriate questions, and that will lead students to generate their own good questions later.
We need appropriate questions which link all the information to the understanding of contents. English teaching in Japan has had a significant accumulation of bottom-up reading, that is, the long history of the grammar-translation method. The amount of background information English teachers can provide has increased significantly, thanks to the proliferation of the Internet. These days, many English textbooks have a certain amount of comprehension questions. Provided the questions are appropriate, what we still need is to have an appropriate schedule and procedure to introduce the appropriate questions.