Teaching Strategies

Preview/Simplified Text Summary

Chen and Graves (1995) state (in Grabe and Stoller, 2002) that providing a simplified text summary is significantly more useful for students than providing only background knowledge support or just asking students to read the text. Surprisingly, previewing alone was about as effective as a preview combined with background knowledge. Students in the study also said that it was important to go over difficult words that were going to be in the text.

Previews are relatively easy to prepare and take little class time to present. A preview is the gist of the longer text written using relatively simple sentence construction. A preview often has an accompanying visual.

Grabe, W., & Stoller, F. (2002). Teaching and Researching Reading. Great Britain: Pearson Education.