Pre-reading Activities

Before choosing a pre-reading activity, consider the text itself first!

1. Some have genre patterns we can identify easily.
2. Some titles are clues or illustrative.
3. Some others need deeper knowledge to discover what they are like.

Pre-reading activities: Word Associations, Discussions, Previewing, Predicting, Text Genre, Reviewing Familiar Stories, Scanning and Skimming are some of the great load of fun activities we can use to develop good reading skills.

Let´s check what they are about!

In pre-reading, we can use word associations to brainstorm or free-write or even sematic-map content.

*Brainstorming consists of letting the flow of ideas come out and jot them down as they come up.

*Free-writing consists of writing everything that comes to your mind as soon as it happens and avoiding those ideas to disappear in a determined period. Here, grammar and spelling don´t matter as they are irrelevant stuff at the moment.

*Sematic mapping is a technique that consists of unifying units of discourse to form new units with same or different meanings. It is very uselful to draw upon new ideas and be creative with language expansion.

Other thingswe must take into account are the pragmatic criteria of author, text topic, audience, context, etc.

So, here is where Anticipation Guidelines are to support us. It is a funny method that considers true or false statements to see what others know about a topic.

*Previewing is a high-speed-reading skill that allows us to have a quick once-over of the text to gain some clue of what it is to come. It is similar to a forshadowing. With it we examine the structure and identify key parts or ideas of the text.

*Predicting is to guess through language so as to know what is to come while you read a piece.

Things to deem about in a text are title, pictures, photographs, statistics, tables, graphs, words from the text, charts, etc.

In pre-reading we commonly come across some basic text genres, such as: literary genres; detective stories, epistolary novels, elegiac poetry, suspense stories, science fiction, dialogues, fables, fairy tales and non-fiction genres; newspaper articles, charticles, editorials, research reports, reader´s digest articles, philosophical treaties, biographies, etc. This is to name some.

In the second part, we are going to talk about the rest of the pre-reading techniques.