ELT365 · Day 171 — Top-down reading — what readers bring

Idea — Top-down reading means using title, headings, layout, and prior knowledge to predict and check meaning before decoding every word.

Example — A reader seeing the headline Markets fall on rate fears already expects vocabulary like “investors”, “central bank”, “percent”.

Try — Before your next reading lesson, ask learners to predict five words the text contains. Tick them as they find each one.

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