Hello Learners,
Among LSRW
Skills, Reading skill holds an important place. All the four skills are
necessary for communication as well as teaching learning place. Let’s see the
Reading skill, its technique, types and importance in detail.
Reading for study
You already
use a range of reading styles in everyday situations. The normal reading style
that you might use for reading a novel is to read in detail, focusing on every
word in sequence from start to finish. If it is a magazine you are reading, you
might flick through the pages to see which articles are of interest. When you
look in a telephone directory for a particular name, you purposefully ignore
all other entries and focus your attention on spotting the name you want. These
everyday reading skills can be applied to your studies. (Student
Learning Development)
Reading goals
Clear
reading goals can significantly increase your reading efficiency. Not
everything in print will be of use to you. Use reading goals to select and priorities
information according to the task in hand.
·
an
essay or seminar subject;
·
a
report brief;
·
a
selected subject area;
·
a
series of questions about a specific topic.
Use your
reading goals to help you identify the information that is relevant to your
current task.
Choosing a text
You will
need to assess the text to see if it contains information that is relevant to
your reading goals.
·
Check
the date of publication. Is the information up-to-date?
·
Read
the publisher's blurb at the back or inside sleeve for an overview of the
content.
·
Check
the contents page for relevant chapters.
·
Look
up references for your topic in the index.
·
If
the text does not seem relevant, discard it.
Detailed reading and note taking
Once you
have selected useful information, you can begin to read in detail. Note taking
techniques provide a useful aid to reading. Use:
·
Underlining
and highlighting to pick out what seem to you the most central or important
words and phrases. Do this in your own copy of texts or on photocopies - never
on borrowed texts;
·
Keywords
to record the main headings as you read. Use one or two keywords for each main
point. Keywords can be used when you don't want to mark the text;
·
Questions
to encourage you to take an active approach to your reading. Record your
questions as you read. They can also be used as prompts for follow up work;
·
Summaries
to check you have understood what you have read. Pause after a section of text
and put what you have read in your own words. Skim over the text to check the
accuracy of your summary, filling in any significant gaps.
These
techniques encourage an active engagement with the text as well as providing
you with a useful record of your reading. Avoid passively reading large amounts
of text, it does not make effective use of your time. Always use a note taking
technique to increase your levels of concentration and understanding.
The four main types of reading
techniques:-
1. Skimming
2. Scanning
3. Intensive
4. Extensive
- Skimming
Skimming is
sometimes referred to as gist reading. Skimming may help in order to know what
the text is about at its most basic level. You might typically do this with a
magazine or newspaper and would help you mentally and quickly shortlist those
articles which you might consider for a deeper read. You might typically skim
to search for a name in a telephone directory.
You can
reach a speed count of even 700 words per minute if you train yourself well in
this particular method. Comprehension is of course very low and understanding
of overall content very superficial.
·
Scanning
Picture
yourself visiting a historical city, guide book in hand. You would most
probably just scan the guide book to see which site you might want to visit.
Scanning involves getting your eyes to quickly scuttle across sentence and is
used to get just a simple piece of information. Interestingly, research has
concluded that reading off a computer screen actually inhibits the pathways to
effective scanning and thus, reading of paper is far more conducive to speedy
comprehension of texts.
Something
students sometimes do not give enough importance to is illustrations. These
should be included in your scanning. Special attention to the introduction and
the conclusion should also be paid.
·
Intensive Reading
You need to
have your aims clear in mind when undertaking intensive reading. Remember this
is going to be far more time consuming than scanning or skimming. If you need
to list the chronology of events in a long passage, you will need to read it
intensively. This type of reading has indeed beneficial to language learners as
it helps them understand vocabulary by deducing the meaning of words in
context. It moreover, helps with retention of information for long periods of
time and knowledge resulting from intensive reading persists in your long term memory.
This is one reason why reading huge amounts of information just before an exam
does not work very well. When students do this, they undertake neither type of
reading process effectively, especially neglecting intensive reading. They may
remember the answers in an exam but will likely forget everything soon
afterwards.
·
Extensive reading
Extensive
reading involves reading for pleasure. Because there is an element of enjoyment
in extensive reading it is unlikely that students will undertake extensive
reading of a text they do not like. It also requires a fluid decoding and
assimilation of the text and content in front of you. If the text is difficult
and you stop every few minutes to figure out what is being said or to look up
new words in the dictionary, you are breaking your concentration and diverting
your thoughts.
Increasing your reading speed
It is more
important to improve your reading skills than your reading speed. Being focused
and selective in your reading habits will reduce the time you spend reading.
If, in addition to using a range of reading skills you want to increase your
reading speed, then the following technique will be of use. The average reading
speed is about 240-300 words per minute. For the average reader, the eye fixes
on each word individually. It is easy for your eye to recognize 4 or 5 words in
a single fixation without a loss of understanding. The key to increasing your
reading speed is not to increase the speed at which your eyes move across the
page, but to increase the word span for a single fixation. A simple way of
developing the habit of taking in more than one word per fixation is to take a
page of text and divide it length ways into three with two lines drawn down the
page. Using a pen or pencil as a pointer, read each line of text by allowing
your eye to fall only in the middle of each of the three sections, as indicated
by your pointer.
Developing your reading speed
·
Don't
worry about how quickly you are reading but instead, concentrate on reading the
line in only three fixations.
·
As
this becomes more natural, practice without drawing lines.
·
Later,
reduce the number of fixations to two per line.
·
Once
this increased word span becomes a comfortable habit, an increase in your
reading speed will occur.
·
Using
clear reading goals and a variety of reading skills is more important than
increasing your reading speed.
·
To
improve your reading speed, don't increase the speed of the eye across the
page, but increase the number of words the eye recognizes in a single fixation.
Works Cited
Student Learning Development. "Improving your
reading skills." 2009. University of Leicester. 20 8 2018.
<https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ld/resources/study-guides-pdfs/study-skills-pdfs/improving-reading-v0.1.pdf>.
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