EDUC91122 Chap.9 Before, During and After Reading
Before, During and After Reading
Reading support is most coherent when it is organised around what readers need before, during and after engagement with a text. Before reading, teachers establish purpose and activate only the knowledge needed to enter the text. During reading, learners monitor understanding, connect information and repair breakdowns. After reading, they transform, evaluate and communicate meaning.
The sequence is not a bag of activities: each move should prepare for the authentic task and gradually transfer strategic control to learners.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Before reading: purpose, selective knowledge activation and productive prediction
- 02
During reading: monitoring, annotation, questioning and repair
- 03
After reading: synthesis, transformation, evaluation and application
- 04
Teacher think-alouds as demonstrations of strategic decision making
- 05
Gradual transfer from prompted strategy use to independent selection
Worked example · free
AskSia practice: align a reading sequence to purpose
- 1Before reading, establish the evaluative purpose and preview only the policy context needed to understand the competing claims.
- 1During reading, annotate each argument's claim, evidence and assumptions, pausing to compare how the evidence is used.
- 1After reading, require a justified judgement that weighs the quality and relevance of evidence across both arguments.
Key terms
- Reading purpose
- The goal that directs what a reader attends to, how information is processed and what outcome is produced.
- Think-aloud
- A teacher demonstration that makes otherwise invisible decisions, checks and repairs during reading explicit.
- Monitoring
- Checking whether an interpretation remains coherent and noticing when understanding has broken down.
- Repair strategy
- A purposeful response to a comprehension breakdown, such as rereading, slowing down, resolving a reference or seeking contextual information.
- Transfer
- Independent selection and adaptation of a strategy in a new text, task or disciplinary context.
Before, During and After Reading FAQ
Should every reading lesson include all three phases?
The phases are a planning lens, not a compulsory worksheet. Some texts need minimal preparation or an extended during-reading investigation. What matters is that support responds to purpose and includes meaningful consolidation or use.
What makes prediction useful rather than decorative?
A useful prediction draws on relevant cues, creates a reason to read and is revised against evidence. Guessing from a title without later checking the idea does little to support comprehension or disciplinary reasoning.
How do strategies become independent?
Teachers model why and when a move is useful, guide learners through selection and reflection, then reduce prompts across varied texts. Independence means choosing strategically, not performing a named routine on every passage.
Assessment move
Work backwards from one authentic post-reading product, such as an evidence-based comparison. Specify what readers must notice during the text and what limited preparation makes that noticing possible. Add one think-aloud that explains a decision, not just an action. Finally, mark which supports will be faded and how learners will explain their own strategy choice. Audit the before phase for relevance.
List every fact, term and prediction activity you planned, then draw a line from each to a later reading demand. Remove anything with no line and add only the knowledge without which the text becomes inaccessible. This guards against replacing reading with a long preview or using prediction as an isolated guessing game. During reading, choose two stopping points that correspond to meaningful decisions.
At the first, model how you notice and repair a breakdown. At the second, provide a prompt but leave the decision to learners. Name what evidence will show that they monitored meaning rather than merely paused where instructed. Include coordination across modes if the text requires it. After reading, design a transformation rather than a recall list.
Ask learners to reconstruct a process, compare claims, justify a classification or apply an idea to a changed condition. Check that the product draws on the purpose established before reading and the relationships traced during reading. Add a short reflection in which learners identify the action that changed their understanding and point to evidence in the new product. Plan the fade across two further texts.
Reduce the think-aloud to a cue, replace a supplied organiser with a choice among tools and finally ask learners to justify an independently selected strategy. Record when the strategy is useful and when it is not. Your final revision should show a coherent path from readiness to monitoring to disciplinary use, with every routine serving that path.
If the sequence still works after the final task is changed completely, it is probably generic and needs to be rebuilt around the actual reading purpose.
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