Hello colleagues, I focus a lot on reading in my classroom. I want to design instruction so that learners "read closely." To me, reading closely means that students are re-reading for different purposes. One tool I like to use is an "anticipation guide." I create a series of true/false (or agree/disagree) statements based on the text we are reading. Students answer the questions before they read and again after they read. The exercise gets them thinking about what they already know about a topic and gives them a purpose for their reading. I have the students work together with a partner or two to discuss their answers both before and after reading. After reading, they must be able to cite evidence from the text to support their answers.
An anticipation guide serves to assess both background knowledge as well as learners' understanding of the text they are reading. I have found this approach to be an engaging way to assess learners' reading comprehension.
I'm uploading an example of an anticipation guide I used recently with an article from our local newspaper about the dangers of lead in people's homes. What do you think of this approach to introducing text? Have you used anticipation guides in your teaching to assess reading comprehension? If so, how has this worked for you? What do you see as the potential benefits of adding a discussion component to a lesson like this? What are some other ideas for assessing reading comprehension?
Looking forward to hearing about your reading assessment practices.
Cheers, Susan
Moderator, Assessment CoP
Comments
Susan, thanks for sharing valuable practices for helping learners develop comprehension at different levels and for different purposes.
I often advocate helping students develop the "top-down" listening practices that so many of our students lack when listening to lectures :( In reading we would just modify the strategy to top-down reading!
"Do you ever get your students to predict the content of a listening activity beforehand, maybe using information about the topic or situation, pictures, or key words? If so, you are already helping them to develop their top-down processing skills, by encouraging them to use their knowledge of the topic to help them understand the content." (from BBC's Teaching English, "Listening: Top down and bottom up" (2007) http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/listening-top-down-bottom
Your ideas also remind me of the effective KWL approach to anticipating new content to be covered among learners.
The guide you posted is very helpful, and one that I will share with teachers with whom I work! Leecy