Methods · Support & cognitive load
A12
Pre-teaching vocabulary
Learn the eight to twelve load-bearing terms a text depends on before you read it, so the reading becomes about the argument, not about surviving the lexicon.
When to use it
- You are about to start a new unit and want a plan before you open the textbook.
- You keep meaning to revise, but nothing on your calendar says when.
What to ask AI
Type something like: “I am about to read the following text. List the 8-12 terms a reader MUST”.
Ask it to generate material for you to attempt, problems, cues, or a schedule, not finished answers.
Keep the hard part on your side: you retrieve, attempt, explain, or decide before you ask for help.
How it helps
By paragraph two you're looking up words.
By paragraph four you're rereading sentence by sentence.
By the end you have a vague sense of topic and no sense of structure, because working memory spent itself on decoding terms the author assumed you already owned.
That assumption is often reasonable for the author's intended audience and fatal for you.
Pre-teaching vocabulary is not "studying words for fun." It is clearing the runway so the reading can do what reading is for: following claims, evidence, and structure.
It Works well alongside Jargon translation jargon translation (how to own a term) and Advance organisers advance organisers (structure before detail).
A12 is specifically the before the text gate: identify the dependency vocabulary, learn it, then read.
How to run it
- Don't read the chapter cold. Skim only for term harvesting, or paste a chunk and ask for the dependency list.
- Next: cap the list. Eight to twelve terms. More means you haven't distinguished load-bearing from decorative.
- Learn them with Jargon translation's loop: your words, field check, one example each.
- Next: quick retrieval: cover and produce definitions. Misses stay on the list; hits can ride along.
- Next: then read the text for argument, not for vocabulary. When a term still blocks you, add it, but resist turning reading back into dictionary mode.
- Next: afterward: note which "pre-taught" terms the text used in a sharper way than your prep. Update the glossary. That update is real learning about the field's usage.
Example exchange
I'm about to read a chapter on natural selection. List only the load-bearing terms I'd need first, not every hard word, and wait before explaining the chapter.
Load-bearing for that chapter usually includes variation, heritability, differential survival, and fitness. Pick one and define it in your own words before we go on.
Fitness means how strong or healthy an organism is.
That's the everyday meaning, and it's a trap here. In this chapter, what outcome is fitness actually measuring?
Copyable prompt
I am about to read the following text. List the 8-12 terms a reader MUST
already understand to follow the argument, not every hard word, only the
load-bearing ones. For each, give a one-line reason it is load-bearing here.
Do not explain the chapter's thesis yet.
[paste or describe chapter]The Tell
Here is how you know this method has flipped: after "reading," you can define terms only by looking back at the glossary you never retrieved from, and you cannot outline the argument.
In that moment the AI (or the schedule, or the story) did the thinking, and you only recognised a finished product.
Tighten the prompt for pre-teaching vocabulary so you attempt, decide, or retrieve before anything is handed to you.
Principle evidence
Strength of the underlying learning idea, not a claim about AI products.
The underlying learning idea is rated moderate. Pre-teaching vocabulary before a text is a standard reading-comprehension / content-area literacy practice (background knowledge and lexical access effects). Principle moderate and classroom-proven in outline; AI choice of the “right 8-12 terms” is speculative.
AI delivery evidence
Whether an AI tutor delivers this method well is a separate question.
The learning principle may be moderate, but that does not prove an AI session delivers it well. Treat AI delivery as speculative unless a study of tutoring with this method is named, and none is claimed here.