Pre-reading strategy that works

When good readers pick up a text, even before they start reading they make predictions about the text. They automatically ask questions about what they are going to learn from the text and they think about what they already know about the topic of the text. Dependent readers do not have any of those skills which are a fundamental part of reading comprehension.

I've been experimenting recently with anticipation guides as means of scaffolding the pre-reading process. My experiment has taken place during my poetry unit. Before introducing a poem to the class I send my students a Google Form, which is an online survey tool, with a series of yes or no questions. For example, when we looked at Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven," I sent students a form asking if they had ever been home alone. I asked them if they believed in ghosts or if people could be haunted. Using the "show summary" function in Google Forms, I posted a pie chart of the student responses to each question immediately after administering the questionnaire. Next, I have students present the results of our anticipation guide by summing up the class's response to each yes or no anticipatory question. After we sum up the class feelings on each question I have students make a prediction about what the day's poem is going to be about.

The result of using Google Form driven anticipation guides is that students are forced to think about what the text is going to be about. Summarizing the results of an anticipation guide helps to structure the pre-reading discussion that takes place in my classroom. Students are then able to dive into a difficult poem with predictions about the poem in mind. Anticipation guides help structure many of the automatic thought processes that proficient readers use. This empowers dependent readers to more fully engage with a new text.