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Dickens had encountered that narrative trope in the stories written by the Lowell mill girls, who typically published either anonymously or under pseudonyms like “Dorothea” or “M.” In one anonymous story called “A Visit from Hope,” the narrator is “seated by the expiring embers of a wood fire” at midnight, when a ghost, an old man with “thin white locks,” appears before him. The ghost takes the narrator back to scenes from his youth, and afterward the narrator promises to “endeavor to profit by the advice he gave me.” Similarly, in “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is sitting beside “a very low fire indeed” when Marley’s ghost appears before him. And, later, after Scrooge has been visited by the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future, he promises, “The spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

That’s not how the scholars see it. Literary borrowing, even quite detailed borrowing, was accepted practice at the time—“It was just a different way of looking at things back then,” says Archibald. (“American Notes,” for instance, includes many pages of writing by the famed 19th-century physician Samuel Gridley Howe, all without attribution, and apparently without any thought by Dickens that he was doing something improper.)

The Three Stages Of Reading strategy involves teaching students to delve into text. The Before Reading stage provides a scaffold for new concepts and vocabulary, promotes engagement and provides a means for prediction. The second stage, During Reading, allows students to integrate the knowledge and information they bring to the text with ‘new’ information in the text. The last stage, After Reading, allows students to articulate and process their understanding of what they have read and to think critically about the validity of the text.

Before Reading Stage

One of the purposes of Before Reading is to acknowledge the different experiences and background knowledge that students bring to a text, influencing how they will read and learn from a particular text. By knowing what students bring to a text the teacher can provide students with appropriate scaffolds to make links between what is already known and new information presented in a text.