THE ROLE OF PREDICTION SKILLS IN THE READING COMPREHENSION PROCESS: PSYCHOLINGUISTIC FOUNDATIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR EFL

Reading comprehension in a foreign language is not the passive decoding of symbols but an active, constructive process in which prediction - the reader’s anticipation of upcoming content on the basis of title, context and background knowledge - occupies a central position. This article analyses the role of prediction (anticipation) skills in the reading-comprehension process and derives pedagogical implications for English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The aim of the study is to clarify the concept and the types of prediction, to establish its psycholinguistic and cognitive foundations, and to explain its relationship with reading comprehension. A theoretical-analytical method was employed, combining conceptual analysis, a cross-linguistic comparison of definitions across the English, Russian and Uzbek methodological traditions, and a synthesis of psycholinguistic and pedagogical scholarship. The results show that, although the phenomenon is labelled differently across traditions (prediction; вероятностное прогнозирование / антиципация; antitsipatsiya), its essence converges on a single mechanism - the reduction of uncertainty through the prior elimination of unlikely alternatives. Prediction operates at both the content (semantic) and the linguistic (lexical) level and integrates top-down and bottom-up processing. Its cognitive basis is provided by schema theory, the theory of automaticity and recent psycholinguistic accounts of incremental, anticipatory language processing; prediction is, in Smith’s formulation, “the core of reading”. The discussion demonstrates that foreign-language learners predict less efficiently than native speakers because of limited linguistic experience, and that extensive reading provides a natural means of building the schematic and linguistic resources on which prediction depends. The study concludes that prediction is an indispensable, central component of reading comprehension that must be developed explicitly and systematically, and offers practical recommendations for cultivating it at the pre-, while- and post-reading stages.