The Role of pre-reading task instructions in reading comprehension: a systematic review

Promoting students’ reading comprehension is a topic of interest for researchers and educators. One way to promote students’ reading comprehension is to provide students with task instructions before reading (i.e. pre-reading task instructions). In this systematic review, we investigated the characteristics of studies that have focused on pre-reading task instructions and identified the associations between various pre-reading task instructions and reading comprehension. The findings revealed that pre-reading task instructions vary with respect to signaling reading content (content-focused), prompting reading strategy use (strategy-focused), specifying reading purpose (purpose-focused), and other factors (other-focused), all of which had distinct associations with reading comprehension. Specifically, content-focused instructions were generally associated with better memory performance, purpose-focused instructions were linked to improved memory and understanding based on specific tasks, and strategy-focused instructions tended to facilitate various levels of reading comprehension. Moreover, combining instruction types, such as pairing a purpose-focused instruction (e.g. “read to write an essay”) with a strategy-focused instruction (e.g. “take notes”), was associated with cumulative or complementary benefits across comprehension measures. Process-level data, including reading time and verbal protocols, were also synthesized to explain these associations. The review concludes with a discussion of current research limitations and directions for future research.