THE READING SKILL

Skimming and Scanning:

“Skimming refers to the process of reading only main ideas within a passage to get an overall impression of the content of a reading selection.”

Explanation: (for understanding)

Skimming refers to looking only for the general or main ideas, and works best with non-fiction (or factual) material. With skimming, your overall understanding is reduced because you don’t read everything. You read only what is important to your purpose. Skimming takes place while reading and allows you to look for details in addition to the main ideas.

How to skim? Many people think that skimming is a haphazard process placing the eyes where ever they fall. However, to skim effectively, there has to be a structure but you don’t read everything. What you read is more important than what you leave out. So what material do you read and what material do you leave out?

How to Skim:

* Read the title.

* Read the introduction or the first paragraph.

* Read the first sentence of every other paragraph.

* Read any headings and sub-headings.

* Notice any pictures, charts, or graphs.

* Notice any italicized or boldface words or phrases.                                                                       

* Read the summary or last paragraph.

“Scanning is a reading technique to be used when you want to find specific information quickly. In scanning you have a question in your mind and you read a passage only to find the answer, ignoring unrelated information.”

Explanation: (for understanding)

Scanning is another useful tool for speeding up your reading. Unlike skimming, when scanning, you look only for a specific fact or piece of information without reading everything. You scan when you look for your favorite show listed in the cable guide, for your friend’s phone number in a telephone book, and for the sports scores in the newspaper. For scanning to be successful, you need to understand how your material is structured as well as comprehend what you read so you can locate the specific information you need. Scanning also allows you to find details and other information in a hurry.

How to scan.  Because you already scan many different types of material in your daily life, learning more details about scanning will be easy. Establishing your purpose, locating the appropriate material, and knowing how the information is structured before you start scanning is essential.

The material you scan is typically arranged in the following ways: alphabetically, chronologically, non-alphabetically, by category, or textually. Alphabetical information is arranged in order from A to Z, while chronological information is arranged in time or numerical order.

How to Scan:

* State the specific information you are looking for.

* Try to anticipate how the answer will appear and what clues you might use to help you locate the answer. For example, if you were looking for a certain date, you would quickly read the paragraph looking only for numbers.

* Use headings and any other aids that will help you identify which sections might contain the information you are looking for.

* Selectively read and skip through sections of the passage.

Intensive Reading & Extensive Reading

Ø Extensive Reading:

“Extensive reading” is considered as being reading rapidly. The readers read books after books. Its attention is paid to the meaning of the text itself not the language. The purpose of extensive reading is for pleasure and information. Those, extensive reading is also termed as “supplementary reading”.

Ø Intensive Reading:

“Intensive reading” means that the readers take a text, study it line by line, and refer at very moment to the dictionary about the grammar of the text itself

1.  Extensive Reading:
Extensive Reading is “generally associated with reading large amounts with the aim of getting an overall understanding of the material. Readers are more concerned with the meaning of the text than the meaning of individual words or sentences.” Bamford and Day (1997)

b. Extensive reading is of large quantities of material or long texts, because reading is individualized, students choose the books by themselves what they want to read.

2.  Intensive reading :

Intensive reading is usually “a classroom-oriented activity in which students focus on the linguistic or semantic details of a passage. Intensive reading calls students' attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers, and other surface structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning”.( Brown (2007)).

b. Intensive reading is a process where students read material which is usually above their linguistic level.

Differences b/w Extensive and Intensive Reading:

The first difference is that Extensive Reading covers large area, while Intensive Reading covers narrower area.

The second difference is about students’ activity in class. In Extensive Reading the students’ activity is more complex than in Intensive Reading.

The last, Extensive Reading will discourage the over- use of dictionary ; on the contrary dictionary is a must in Intensive Reading.