Prediction and Reflection in Reading in a Foreign Language.

A technique for teaching skills in reading in a foreign language is based on the assumptions that the development of foreign-language reading skills is similar to the development of native-language reading skills, that the purpose of reading is to integrate new and existing knowledge, and that the reader's knowledge, opinions, or experience should be emphasized as much as the text content. The technique involves the use of pre-reading questions exploring the reader's opinions, questions accompanying the text that encourage evaluation of the opinions expressed in the text as it is read, and exercises that encourage the reader to predict what subsequent text will contain, a feature that is especially useful for teaching languages for scientific purposes. Use of the approach among science students in an English-medium faculty in a Middle East university, where traditional reading instruction was expected, required presenting the prediction exercises as a comprehension test and adjusting the technique based on the students' responses. The advantage to the use of prediction is that it allows an insight into the cognitive processes at work when a reader approaches a text, and it emphasizes the role of background knowledge and experience in comprehension. The immediate value of this type of work lies in the break it makes with established habits of looking at texts as completed artefacts, rather than as opportunities for mental interaction. The long-term value of predictive work has yet to be proven. (MSE)