Anticipation Guide
An anticipation guide is a series of statements students respond to independently before reading specific text. The discussion which follows after anticipation guides are completed is where the real value lies for both teachers and students. The teacher's role during discussion time is to stimulate and kindle notions as students make connections between their knowledge of the world and the predictions they create. Teachers must remain open to a wide range of responses, while carefully expanding ideas and concepts students bring to the conversation in order to keep the discussion moving.
Time to complete the anticipation guides and the discussion that follows should be brief. Neither should give away too much about what is in the text. The main focus of the lessons should be on digging into the text itself.
Anticipation guides may vary in format, but not in purpose. In each case, the readers' expectations about meaning are raised before they read the text. As recommended in Vacca and Vacca, (p. 198), keep these guidelines in mind while creating, constructing, and implementing anticipation guides:
1. Analyze the material to be read. Determine the major ideas - implicit and explicit - with which students will interact.
2. Write those ideas in short, clear, declarative statements. These statements should in some way reflect the world in which the students live or about which they know. Therefore, avoid abstractions whenever possible.
3. Put these statements in a format that will elicit anticipation and prediction.
4. Discuss the students' predictions and anticipations before they read the text selection.
5. Assign the text selection. Have the students evaluate the statements in light of the author's intent and purpose.
6. Contrast the readers' predictions with the author's intended meaning.
Anticipation Guide for The Cask of Amontillado
You will be reading a famous Edgar Allen Poe short story, "The Cask of Amontillado," where you will be introduced to two main characters, Fortunato, (against whom Montresor seeks revenge), and Montresor, (a deranged man). This short story is told in first person by Montresor. He is considered to be an unreliable narrator because of his mental imbalance. In the anticipation guide below, mark the quotations or statements with an 'M' if you believe they describe or were spoken by Montresor. Mark the statements with an 'F' if you believe they describe or were spoken by Fortunato. Each statement is unique to one character or another.
¾ "I must not punish but punish with impunity."
¾ "Come, let us go. To your vaults."
¾ "My friend, no. It is not the engagement, but the severe cold with which I perceive you are afflicted. The vaults are insufferably damp."
¾ There are no attendants at home; they had absconded to make merry in honor of the time. I had told them I should not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house.
¾ "Pass your hand over the wall; you cannot help feeling the nitre. Indeed it is very damp. Once more let me implore you to return. No? Then I will positively leave you. But I must first render you all the little attentions in my power."
¾ "He! he! he! - he! he! he! - yes, the Amontillado. But is it not getting late? Will not they be awaiting us at the palazzo - the Lady Fortunato and the rest? Let us be gone."
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