Improving ESL Reading Skills
Teaching Strategies: Pre-reading Activities for the ESL Learner
This article focuses on prior knowledge which is activated even before learners start reading the text, as part of Pre-Reading Activities.
Pre-reading activities get students ready to read a text. Taking time to prepare students before they read can have a considerable effect on their understanding of what they read and their enjoyment of the reading activity.
Why pre-reading activities?
Isn’t it enough to get kids to just start reading?
ESL/EFL learners need a reason to read. Activating prior knowledge is extremely important therefore for the ESL or EFL learner who does not feel completely confident of his / her ability to read in the target language. This is where pre-reading activities come in.
Pre-reading also has practical implications for lesson design and planning. A reading lesson typically has three parts: pre, while and post activities. The logic behind activating prior knowledge is to build upon what students already know about a topic as a lead-in to the main reading task. The more teachers activate students’ prior knowledge, the easier it will be for the students to retain new information from the main reading task.
The following are some of the many uses of Pre-Reading Activities:
- Motivating and setting purposes for reading
- Activating and building background knowledge
- Relating the reading to students’ lives
- Pre-teaching vocabulary and concepts
- Pre-questioning, predicting, and direction setting
Sample Pre-reading activities based on the text "Online Reading for News Addicts"
- Brainstorm about types of media. Ask the class - What kinds of media they are familiar with and do they use?
- Discuss the text type (If it is a newspaper article, spend considerable time discussing facts and opinions)
- Predict based on the title, later confirming their guesses during the while stages of reading.
- Read the first line of each paragraph and try to predict a title or theme for each one.
- Brainstorm the News Addiction Phenomenon –When-Where-Who? What Happens? Why? eliciting thematic lexical items while brainstorming
- Ask students to relate the phenomenon to their personal lives, to provide examples (frontally)activating personal knowledge
- A KWL graphic organiser.....the pupils fill in the column of what they "KNOW" either about addition or cyberjournalism and they then ask about "What they "WANT" to know. They fill in what they learned after they have read the text.
- Activating prior knowledge on news consumption habits in the form of a class discussion or group work. Sample beginning questions: How do you get the news - from radio, TV, newspaper, Internet?
- Predicting what the text is about according to the external text features: the picture, the title in bold, the subtitle, the type of the text.
Further Reading
The following websites deal with prior knowledge, why it's important and how to activate it.
Teaching Strategies: Activating Prior Knowledge
Strategies for Reading Comprehension
Strategies for Reading to Learn: Semantic Maps
Critical Issue: Building on Prior Knowledge and Meaningful Student Contexts/Cultures.
Children, When Reading, Construct Their Own Meaning.
