Reading strategies: Predict

What is it that really catches your interest, and makes you want to read a book or a text? You probably do what many others do; you look at the book and ask yourself: What’s this book about? You might read the title and see if you recognise the author or the genre. If you feel curious, you read the back of the book, and flick through some pages, before you make up your mind. When you do this, a process is started in your brain.

Your thoughts about the book build up your interest and make you curious about the contents. This process is a reading strategy: predicting. As an active reader you use this strategy when deciding what you want to read. But you are also predicting when actually reading. As you read, you always have some thought, some expectation, about what is going to happen.

This curiosity comes both from what you read in the text and from your own experiences. Next time you are reading a novel or a story, take a short pause now and then to ask: What’s going to happen now? What is the main character going to do and say? Who’s going to appear then? and Why?

Maybe you’ll notice that this makes you more active, and deepens your reading experience. The strategy of predicting, also makes a good study technique. When you predict in a factual text, you’ll understand it better. It also gets easier to remember what you’ve read. There are two reasons for this… ...the first is curiosity: When you predict, you’ll get more curious about what’s to come, and it gets easier and more fun to learn. ...secondly, if you have some idea of what’s ahead before you get there, factual texts are easier to understand.

Developing pre-understanding for something you’re reading makes the text easier to follow - and more interesting. If there is a summary at the end of a factual text, then try reading that first, before you predict the rest of the text. Then you’ll have gained some pre-understanding, before you dive into the text. In the same way, you might also start by reading: headers, introduction and captions. Then you ask questions like: What is the text going to be about?

What do I already know about the subject? Is there something unclear: something I want to know? Then keep using the ‘predict’ reading strategy as a study technique throughout the entire reading. Pause at each new header and predict! What’s this section going to be about?

It will make the reading more interesting and you’ll remember the text better. The ‘predict’ reading strategy also works well when you read persuasive texts, like opinion pieces and comments in social media. Texts like that want to affect you and influence your opinions. So here you’ll need to be prepared, and read critically. If you know that it’s a persuasive text, then start by predicting: What is the opinion that the writer wants to persuade me to agree with?

Read the header, captions, and the conclusions at the end of the text. Think about the source: Who is it that wrote the text? What’s their usual opinion? Does the writer represent any organisation, company, or political party? When you have predicted something about what the writer wants to persuade you to believe, it’s easier to spot if the arguments are flawed.

Or if the writer has been weeding out facts that don’t support their view. If you are an active reader, you use the predict strategy… …in narrative texts, to deepen your experience and to create mood… ...as a study technique, to make factual texts easier to understand and remember… ...and for presuasive texts, in order to be more attentive to how the writer wants to influence you. When you read actively, you predict both before you read a text, and while you are reading.