Types of reading

Reading and writing are two basic skills which make part and parcel of education.

In the existing classifications we can come across such terms denoting types of reading as: intensive / close reading, extensive reading, critical reading, narrow reading; surveying; skimming, scanning, etc.

Intensive / close reading is characterized by concentration on a special purpose and accurate interpretation of what we read. It is usually practiced in class with a great degree of guidance on the part of the teacher. Classroom instructions help students to develop efficient reading strategies: concentration on a passage-level semantic clues; formulation of hypothesis about the text before reading, then reading to confirm, refine, or reject the hypothesis; a tolerance for students’ inexactness and making mistakes.

Classroom work cannot substitute the process of reading itself, because people learn to read by reading. Hence, a student must do extensive reading as well. It is reading on a large scale over time, which the student does outside the classroom. Purposes may vary, among them content analysis, looking for relevant information, getting main ideas, overviewing essential points and details, etc. In most cases it does not require understanding every word.

Critical reading presupposes evaluating the manner of the theme treatment and the way of conveying the writer’s personal considerations about the problems raised, a critical judgement and appreciation of facts, arguments, and the style of a text. Critical reading is aimed at finding answers to the questions like these: Do I agree with the writer? Did he/she manage to persuade me? How deep was the author’s penetration into the complexities of the theme discussed?

Narrow reading is reading on a single topic or reading texts written by a certain author. During the process of narrow reading texts become easier to comprehend after the first two pages as far as the reader adjusts to repeated vocabulary of a particular topic and/or to the writer’s style.

Surveying is the strategy of previewing the content of a text and its organization based on references and non-text material. Surveying basically involves making a quick check of the informative extra-text categories: reference data – the title, the author, the table of contents, summaries; graphical data – diagrams, illustrations, and the like; typographical data – all features that help information to stand out including typefaces, spacing, enumeration, underlining, etc.

The term skimming designates glancing through a text to extract its gist or main points. Skimming, as a more text-oriented form of surveying, involves understanding which parts of the text contain important information and reading only those parts. For this reason the process of skimming requires knowledge of text structure. In particular, students should be able to learn about the text topic from the title and subheadings; they should know that the first and the last paragraphs often contain valuable background information, summarising, or concluding information; they should be aware of the role of topic sentences and where to find them.

Scanning is a wide sweeping search for specific information rather than getting a general impression. Scanning demands that the reader should ignore all details but concentrate on looking for the key item. It is a useful strategy for data gathering, reviewing, using reference books, or judging whether the text contains material which is needed.