What You’ll Discover
Top-Down Processing
- Activate background knowledge by prompting students to connect new materials with their existing experiences, setting a meaningful context for comprehension.
- Use title and image predictions to encourage learners to anticipate content before reading or listening, boosting engagement and curiosity.
- Incorporate pre-reading discussion prompts that spark thoughtful conversation, activate schema, and prepare students for deeper interaction with the text.
Bottom-Down Processing
- Employ phoneme-discrimination exercises to sharpen students’ ability to distinguish subtle sound contrasts, improving their listening accuracy.
- Guide learners through lexical-guessing activities, using context clues to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words within authentic passages.
- Design discourse-marker hunts that highlight transition words and reveal the organization of ideas, fostering a stronger grasp of text coherence.
Plus… Dynamic Activity Ideas
- Transform true/false tests into “Find the Error” challenges, where students correct false statements and explain their reasoning.
- Encourage learners to craft one-minute summaries and share them with a partner, reinforcing main ideas and improving synthesis skills.
- Have students create original sentences using key vocabulary, promoting deeper understanding and personalized language use