Pre-reading: what it is, characteristics and functions

It has happened to all of us, especially in high school and university, that we have to read a book, scientific article or text commentary. This task is not very fun and motivating because we know from experience that it is very likely that we will not understand what we read.

This is something that, unfortunately, is very common but, interestingly, it would be relatively easy to fix. Simply documenting in advance what the text is about, who its author is or general aspects of what we are going to read can make reading much easier.

This is called pre-reading, and it is a very useful tool to improve our reading comprehension and motivation.. Let's take a closer look at what it is, what its characteristics and functions are.

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What is pre-reading?

Pre-reading, also called exploratory reading, is a strategy allows us to understand a text in a more comprehensive and detailed way. Pre-reading is the first of the three phases into which the exhaustive reading process is divided, with the reading phase and post-reading being the next two. It consists of preparing what is going to be read in order to understand it better, helping in their reading comprehension and in the effectiveness of the activity.

The purpose of the pre-reading is to discover what the general idea of ​​a text is before entering it, so you know what your secondary themes are. In this way, when proceeding to read the text in a normal way, word by word and sentence by sentence, we will understand its details more easily that, without due prior preparation, we may be they would escape.

Pre-reading it is usually a spontaneous process, doing a quick reading of the text, seeing a little over what goes, looking at how many pages and chapters the book has and other similar actions. However, on other occasions it is done in a more conscious and structured way, documenting what is going to be read, learning the specific terminology of the text, the context in which it was written and acquiring the basic idea of ​​the text, facilitating your reading.

The most common pre-reading action is "scanning." For example, applied to a book, it would consist of looking at its cover and back, looking at the index, seeing the names of the chapters and turn the pages to see if there are photographs or graphics to help us understand what we are going to read. In this way, the reader prepares to advance safely.

Characteristics

Regardless of how we do the pre-reading, this process has the following characteristics.

1. It is usually done with short and complex texts

Although the pre-reading can be done, practically, in any type of text, the recommended ones are the short and complex ones. This type of text is preferred because their size allows them to be approached more deeply before they are read, action which is necessary because the difficulty of the text requires it.

It is for this reason that it is usually a widely used tool in areas such as education and science, in the that texts with new and complicated terminology may be presented and require some familiarization previous.

An example of pre-reading would be to read the abstract of a scientific article and find out who has done it. As the article is relatively short (15-25 pages) but is highly specialized, abstracts help the reader to prepare for what he is going to read.

2. Understand the main idea of ​​the text

All pre-reading share as main characteristic trying to understand what is the main idea of ​​the text to be read. In this way, when we read the text in a normal way, we will be more attentive to the details and nuances that are found in it, nuances that we would avoid without having made a previous preparation.

3. Investigation

Before reading a text normally and trying to understand what is said in it, pre-reading allows us to get an idea of ​​what we are going to read. It may be that we discover something that we did not know or that we are interested in, giving rise to wanting to expand our knowledge on our own.

Pre-reading is a tool that involves carrying out a preliminary investigation, which can be more or less exhaustive. Within this investigation it may be to document us about the life of the author of the text, to which branch of knowledge the content of that reading belongs, when and in what context it was written, learn the terminology specific ...

We can also collect opinions and comments made by other people, to have a better idea of ​​that work and see if it motivates us to read it. Thanks to this we will be able to collect a lot of information that will help us better understand what we read.

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Pre-reading functions

The pre-reading fulfills the following functions.

1. Increase reading comprehension

As we have commented, the main objective of the pre-reading is to help us to understand deeply the text that we are going to read. It is for this reason that this technique is especially recommended in areas in which a difficult text is to be read, with complex subject matter or overly specific terminology.

When we read something that is full of academic terms and the subject is complex, it is very likely that we will lose the thread, we do not find out what we are reading and reading becomes a waste of time and effort. When we finish the text we will realize that we do not remember anything and we will have to read it again.

On the other hand, if we have done a little preliminary research, they have explained to us what the text is about, what is its meaning or what There could be terminology, it is more likely that the reading of it will be more fluent, we will understand the ideas better and learn something.

2. Improve motivation

Reading a text that we do not understand is a heavy, boring and exhausting task. No matter how addicted to books we are, If the text takes away the desire to read it from the beginning, we will hardly understand it or, if you want, we will be able to finish reading it. Motivation is one of the fundamental aspects in reading.

One of the reasons why high school and high school students do not read the texts that put them in duties, both in literature and science, is that they have not previously and adequately explained the text they have to read.

This is especially visible in the subjects of language and literature, since there are not few teachers that they put a literary work as homework that they do not know what it is about and they already think that it will be another book infumable. We started unmotivated, making the reading not rich in nuances.

For this reason, the way in which the teacher introduces the work is essential, since if it manages to awaken the interest of its students, they will have a more fluid reading. Also, if they already know what the book is about, while they read it they will be able to relate ideas that have been discussed in class.

3. Helps to better settle the information

As you read the text in a better documented way and with greater motivation, the reader is able to more easily relate the ideas presented therein. Thanks to this, it is easier to remember what the text was about.

One of the fundamental ideas of socio-constructivism is that meaningful learning are established when the learner has information that can be related to the new information presents. Thus, he builds new knowledge from what he already masters, something fundamental when reading an educational or scientific document.

Bibliographic references:

• Grellet, F. (1981). Developing Reading Skills. A Practical Guide to Reading Comprehension Exercises. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• VV.AA. (2000). The development of reading comprehension in the classroom of Spanish as a foreign language. Caravel, 48. Madrid: SGEL.
• San Mateo Valdehíta, A. (2005). A narrative graded reading for advanced level E / LE students. REDELE, 3. http://www.sgci.mec.es/redele/biblioteca2005/sanmateo.shtml.