Sample activity: docs, pub
Yesterday I wrote about Gist Tasks. An alternative to gist tasks is getting students to predict the content of the reading/listening text, and then read or listen to check their predictions.
Prediction is done before reading or listening, but of course you want to give the students some clue as to what text will be about, so they know what they are making predictions about. Teachers commonly show the students the title of the reading/listening, and maybe draw their attention to any pictures that are in the textbook. Possibly you may even read the first paragraph, or listen to the section of the text. And then students make predictions about what will be in the rest of the text.
A common technique is to turn the title of the text into a question, and then get students to predict the answer to that question.
Here's an example from my own classroom. Q: Skills for Success: Reading and Writing 4: Unit 3 Reading 1: The Good Teen p.65-70
The title of the reading was "The Good Teen".
I asked my students: "What do you think are the characteristics of a Good Teen?"
I asked my students to close their textbooks, and in groups, students brainstormed ideas and wrote their predictions up on the white boards.
Then, I told them to open up their books, read the text, and check which of their predictions were in the text. I gave them a red marker so that they could go back to the white board and check which of their predictions were actually in the text.
Sometimes students miss things on an initial reading, of course, so I also monitored and gave hints. (e.g. "You're missing one. Check paragraph 6 again. One of your predictions was in paragraph 6.")
Listening predictions could be done in a similar way, although if students missed a prediction, the teacher might need to help replaying the relevant section of the audio.
Prediction-and-Check tasks, by their very nature, have to be done as an initial task. So they would be done instead of a gist task.
For years, I thought prediction tasks were a type of gist task, but then when I was working with a CELTA tutor, he set me straight on this. Prediction-and-Check tasks can be gist tasks if they're focused on the main idea of the text. So, for example, if there's a story, and students have to predict the ending, and then they read/listen to check their prediction. Because this is predicting the main idea of the text, it's a gist task.
But in the case mentioned above, where I asked the students to predict all the characteristics of a Good Teen, this is actually a "Finding Specific Information Task", because the students are not checking the text simply for the main idea, they're checking to see which specific characteristics are mentioned.
[To put it simply: If you're asking students to predict the main idea of a text, and then check, it's a gist task. If you're asking students to predict specific information, and then check, then it's a specific information task.]
So, depending on the type of prediction, it's either a gist task or a finding specific information task. If it's used as a finding specific information task, that's okay--you can sometimes substitute finding specific information for gist as the first task in the task cycle. (Finding specific information is still one of the easier tasks in the task cycle--easier than tasks like understanding the text for detailed comprehension and understanding inferences in the text.)
As the CELTA tutor told me, you have to think about what tasks the text lends itself to. (You also consider the level of the students, motivation of the students, et cetera.)
I find a Prediction-and-Check activities to be a useful way to build interest in a text. However, everyone's favorite ELF contrarian Russ Mayne has a blog post on why Prediction activities don't actually work.
Russ Mayne is always entertaining. Read his post. I love the way he's constantly trying to strip away the dogmatism that has grown up in this industry.
But, that being said, if you read Russ Mayne's post, I think it's evident that he's arguing against teaching prediction as a skill. I primarily find prediction-and-check activities useful for building interest in the text. Particularly if you have a group of demotivated students who don't want to be in the classroom, are not interested in the content of the text, and don't want to read it. (We've all been there, right?) In these cases, it can increase motivation slightly to have students input their own ideas first, and then reading the text to check the ideas they themselves have selected.
Below is a sample activity for a listening Prediction and Check that I used for Reflect Listening & Speaking 5 Unit 8 Listening: No Time to Choke p.136-140:
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