Strategy Definitions

Before reading, effective readers anticipate meaning based on their prior knowledge and familiarity with text, create predictions, and anticipate vocabulary they might encounter.

1. Anticipate Meaning: the reader’s ability to use prior knowledge about a perceived subject or topic and text knowledge (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, etc.) to begin formulating ideas about a reading. For example, knowing a great deal about whales and that the book to be read is non-fiction, I can expect to find...

2. Prediction: one of the most powerful strategies an effective reader employs, prediction is the use of one’s knowledge about language, context, and text to anticipate what is coming in writing. While engaged, readers predict words, ideas, story elements, etc. For example, based on the clues I have read so far, I predict that the robbery was committed by...

3. Vocabulary Anticipation: the deliberate act of formulating ideas about text specific words that might be encountered in a reading. For example, knowing that the book is a work of historical fiction about the Revolutionary War, I might expect to find words like...