Developing Reading Skills

Key Reading Skills 1.Selecting what is relevant for the current purpose; 2.Using all the features of the text e.g. headings, layout, typeface; 3.Skimming for content and meaning; 4.Scanning for specifics; 5.Identifying organizational patterns; 6.Understanding relations within a sentence and between sentences; 7.Using cohesive and discourse markers; 8.Predicting, inferring and guessing; 9.Identifying main ideas, supporting ideas and examples; 10.Processing and evaluating the information while reading; 11.Using the information e.g. transferring while or after reading

Reading Task Typology: I.Scanning tasks 1. Finding words e.g. synonyms and/or antonyms 2. Locating grammar features e.g. conjunctions and verb forms 3. Finding specified items e.g. the departure time of a certain bus, the time of a certain radio programme or a TV show 4. Checking dates e.g. using a biography or an obituary to identify a person's date and place of birth 5. Listing items e.g. list all the vegetables on a menu/shopping list or the items that would be bought in one specified shop 6. Making word sets e.g. list adjectives, collective nouns, topic vocabulary 7. Checking newspaper headlines e.g. learners look at a selection of newspaper headlines collected on one sheet to find the title that treats a specific topic

II. Skimming tasks 1. Finding and comparing events e.g. from a biography or an obituary find the major achievements of a person's life. 2. Selecting a title e.g. choose the most appropriate title for a text from a number of options. 3. Creating a title e.g. compose a title for a text or a subtitle for a paragraph 4. Drawing inferences e.g. draw inferences about writer's attitude to a situation or topic.

III. Intensive reading tasks 1. Matching nouns and verbs e.g. circle the noun phrases ad indicate the verb that goes with each one. 2. Split sentences e.g. putting a slash between two or more parts of a longer sentence to show where it could be broken down into clauses. 3. Sentence-combining e.g. indicating where short sentences could be combined and suggesting the linking words that might be used. 4. Making summaries e.g. producing a sentence that summarises a specific paragraph. 5. Selecting a summary e.g. choose the best one out of three/four summaries for the given text. 6. Reordering sentences e.g. deciding the order of a number of jumbled sentences.

7. Reordering paragraphs e.g. deciding the order of a number of jumbled paragraphs that constitute a long text. 8. Gap-filling e.g. reading a gapped text and providing suitable words for the gaps. 9. Completing tables and graphs e.g. presenting data (from a given text) in the form of a table, graph or flow diagram. 10. Taking sides e.g. listing arguments for and against a proposition in the text. 11. Comparing versions e.g. compare two newspaper reports of the same incident in terms of content and language. 12. Identifying facts e.g. separating facts from opinion in a given text.

TASK The following table lists a wide range of question types that we may wish to ask our learners. Complete the table by writing the type of reading task we are dealing with next to each question. An example has been provided.

Question typeReading task type What time does the first train leave for London? Is the writer against or in favour of life-prolonging treatment? Where would you insert the following expressions in the text? How do the two extracts differ in their reporting of the accident? Intensive reading Which books deal in detail with thermodynamics? Complete the flow diagram on the process of bread- making. Combine the following two sentences into one. What word does the writer use to mark the contrast between animals and plants? Put the following sentences in the right order. Is the writer expressing a fact or an opinion when he says … ?