ABSTRACT
Teachers have long been faced with the dilemma of preparing students to read to learn in ways which deemphasize the vicariousness of learning from prose but which, nonetheless, lead students to interpretations that are instructionally appropriate. Efforts to help the reading teacher deal with this dilemma have resulted in a number of recommendations, including, “preteach new vocabulary by drawing upon concepts already familiar to students” and “prompt students to use their prior experience to predict outcomes cued by story titles”. Efforts to help the teacher of a content area deal with this dilemma have led reading educators and content area specialists to recommend the use of several rather distinctive instructional strategies, such as, the advance organizer, the structured overview, and pretesting. These and other recommended strategies for preparing students to read to learn fall under the category of prereading instruction, that is, instruction which precedes students' reading of text material.
