Thursday, September 12, 2013

Developing Reading Skills

Developing Reading Skills
Reading is a complex skill, below are some tips on how to develop particular reading sub-skills.

  • Making use of clues - learners should be able to use the titles, illustrations and the look of the text (bold, italics, paragraphing etc.) to decide what kind of text it is and to start making a few general predictions about its content. The strategy of predicting is very useful.
  • Understanding gist - this is the ability to form a general overview of a text from just making use of the clues and a very quick reading. This means that learners should be skimming texts.
  • Understanding relevant details - learners will be looking for the details that are relevant to the writer's reason for writing, the subject matter of the text and the reader's purpose for reading. For example, if someone is looking at a timetable of all the trains that leave from a particular station, the relevant information is just the details of the journey the reader wishes to take. This is called scanning.
  • Distinguishing main points from secondary points - knowing how a paragraph is structured and how the main point is often made first and then supported by less important detail could help a learner find the information they need. Interpreting is a key strategy here.
  • Distinguishing fact from comment - being able to find the comment will help with understanding the writer's opinions and attitudes and means the reader needs to interpret the text.
  • Identifying relevant information - this is often done by stopping to think about the text and discussing the intended audience, the writer's attitudes and opinions, and the inferences that can be drawn from explicit information in the text. Again, interpreting is important here.
  • Deriving meaning from texts that contain unknown words and phrases - this requires the learner to be able to guess meaning from context or ignore a word they don't know. This is a coping strategy.
  • Using appropriate aids - reference books should be available and learners need to know how to use dictionaries and grammars etc. These will support their learning even if there is no teacher around and help the learner be more independent. Again, this is coping with difficulties and problems when learning.      

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