Pre-Reading Prediction Task

This activity was inspired by the book Doing Task-based Teaching, and is also available online here.

What were we trying to learn?

The class was to help students develop skills that help them to predict what will happen in a text. They were to collaborate in small groups and predict possible outcomes based on the title of a story. After more clues, they were to produce their own story based on what they thought would happen.

How did we do it?

I used a PowerPoint presentation to show the students a picture of the Empire State Building with the headline “Hi, I’ve just jumped off the Empire State Building”. Then I told them that this was taken from a newspaper in 2010 and was a true story. They were then asked to speculate in small groups what happened. Some of the suggestions were:

• He jumped from the 2nd floor.
• He…