Wednesday, August 1, 2012

3 Basic Reading Skills





To improve reading, readers might have to improve 3 basic reading skills; i.e. scanning, skimming, and close reading.

Scanning 
Readers read to find or identify specific information such as names of persons, place, date, etc. which are mentioned in the text. To make it simple, readers find answer to simple questions like
  • What is the person's name?
  • How old is he/she?
  • When did it happen?
  • Who is in the story?
  • Where does it take place?

Skimming
Readers go beyond scanning to find more general information. Readers are required to understand message of sentences and answer more reasoning or open questions; for examples,
  • Why did it happen?
  • Why did he decide to do so?

Close reading
More or less, close reading is a combination of the first two skills and reader's analytical thinking. Readers read  to understand the  meaning of the whole text; they need to find not only information written in the text, but also implied meanings -- the intended meaning which the authors want to show. Readers answer to questions like
  • What is the text about?
  • What are the values you have learned from the text?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This material is helpful to understand the English language lessons