Teaching reading

Approaches to Text

Skills and Strategies

Global Level

Local Level

Careful Reading

Establishing accurate comprehension of explicitly stated main ideas and supporting details. Making propositional inferences.

Identifying lexis. Understanding syntax.

Expeditious Reading

Skimming quickly to establish: discourse topic and main ideas, or structure of text, or relevance to needs.

Search reading to locate quickly and understand information relevant to predetermined needs.

Scanning to locate specific points of information.

Skimming

Reading for gist. The reader asks: ‘What is this text as a whole about?’ while avoiding anything that looks like detail.

The defining characteristics are: a) the reading is selective, with sections of the text either omitted or given very little attention; b) an attempt is made to build up a macrostructure (the gist) on the basis of as few details from the text as possible.

Search Reading

Locating information on predetermined topics. The reader wants information to answer set questions or to provide data for example in completing assignments. It differs from skimming in that the search for information is guided by predetermined topics so the reader does not necessarily have to establish a macropropositional structure for the whole text.

Scanning

Reading selectively, to achieve very specific reading goals, e.g., finding the number in a directory. The main feature of scanning is that any part of the text which does not contain the pre-selected symbol(s) is dismissed. It may involve looking for specific words/phrases, figures/percentages, names, dates of particular events or specific items in an index.

Careful Reading (reading for detail)

The defining features are that the reader attempts to handle the majority of information in the text, that is, the process is not selective; that the reader accepts the writer’s organization, including what the writer appears to consider the important parts; and that the reader attempts to build up a macro-structure on the basis of the majority of the information in the text.

The process can be sequentially bottom-up, from letters to words and from words to sentences and finally to texts. It can also be top-down, a process of confirming and correlating predictions by sampling the visual input. Most likely, the process is interactive involving both bottom-up and top-down reading by interactively using all sources of information and background knowledge.