Reading Skills

What are the four types of reading skills?

Following are the kinds of reading.

i – Intensive Reading

Intensive reading is the close reading of a short text. It is a kind of reading that aims at accuracy of comprehension. It involves the reader in great attention to detail. Here, the reader has to learn the meaning of each and every word. It is considered a useful tool of learning a foreign language.”

ii – Extensive Reading

This kind of reading emphasis less on accuracy and more on gaining fluency. It is done out of the classroom and meant for reader’s own pleasure. Day and Bamford suggest that the motto of extensive reading “reading gain without pain.”

iii – Skimming

Skimming means to go through the text quickly to grasp the overall meaning or gist of it. It is to extract the main theme or the core of the text by a quick reading process. The reader does not pronounce each and every word of the text, rather he focuses his attention on the subject matter, an overall view of the text, and prepares himself to answer such questions:

1. Summarize the given text.

2. Give main points of the text.

3. Rewrite the subject matter in your own words.

4. Give a suitable title to the given passage.

5. Extract the central idea of the text.

Such questions indicate that skimming is like global listening.

How Skimming takes place

1. Be attentive to the clues and indicators like titles, headings, subheadings and typographical indicators (words in italics or bold letters) of important ideas.

2. In an essay, read the first and the last paragraph to grasp the subject matter with clarity of concept.

3. Read the first sentence of each paragraph, as a thesis statement or a topic sentence that means the sentence containing the stand-point or main idea.

4. Look at picture and diagrams with captions or words written below them.

5. Note numbers, date and words that seem important.

iv – Scanning

The sub-skill of reading by which the reader collects a particular information from the given text is known as scanning. The technique of scanning involves the ability to reject or ignore irrelevant information. In order to locate a specific  piece of information, the reader has to go through the text quickly and focus his attention on the relevant part of the text. For example:

1. Look up a word in the dictionary for meanings.

2. Search out a telephone number in the directory.

3. Find out result of a candidate from the Gazette.

4. Locate weather conditions or functions in town in the newspaper.

5. Extract the list of works from the biographical sketch of a writer.

Procedure for Scanning

1. The required information has to kept in the mind of the reader.

2. Decide which clues will be helpful in finding out the specific information.

3. A brisk eye movement on the pages of the text.

4. Read the part of the text which contains the clues leading to the required information.

The clues which help the reader to find out a particular piece of information may be a full sentence some words, a single word, a punctuation mark, alphabetical order, or numbers etc.

The development of scanning skill needs training of eyes to move quickly, looking for the clues related to the required information. Scanning is useful to answer the questions such as:

1. Fill in the blanks.

2. Mark True or False.

3. Multiple Choice Items

4. Short answer/question

Reading Speed

By adopting following important points about reading we can develop a foundational work to enhance reading speed;

Reading is:

• An active as well as a receptive skill.

• Decoding a message.

• Extracting information from a text.

• Getting specific questions answered.

• Making sense of the text an interactive process.

• Predicting and interpreting.

• Referring to and inferring information from a text

• A constant process of guessing

• Constant making and remaking of hypothesis

The following principles of learning to read may also be considered as pre-requisite for developing appropriate speed in reading:

1. The reader must develop the basic sense of what print looks like and how it works.

2. The learner needs to develop the basic sense of what print looks like and how it works.

3. He has to develop the ability to think about words as a sequence of phonemes or building blocks of spoken language. He should understand that sentences are made up of strings of separate words.

4. Awareness of spelling patterns that recur across words hastens progress in reading.

5. Although the ability to sound out words is important for learning to read, it is not enough. Written language is not just speech written down. Instead text brings new vocabulary new language patterns new thoughts etc. The reader must also learn to take the time to reflect on these aspects of the text.