ESL002: Intermediate English as a Second Language

In ESL001, we learned about active reading strategies. Using these strategies helps you understand and remember what you read more successfully. This unit in ESL002 will review these strategies and give you a chance to practice them again on different types of texts. As a college student, improving your reading skills comes with important benefits: better study skills and better comprehension.

Different Ways to Read a Text

In the course of your day, you will read many different texts - for college, for pleasure, or for your daily activities. You will not read all of them in the same way. There are different approaches to reading, and choosing the right strategy can often save you time. Here are some you can use:

1. Predicting

   Whatever you are reading, don't just jump in and start reading the first paragraph or the first sentence. Guess what the text is going to be about. Predicting is an activity you often see in textbooks asking you to answer questions before you actually read the text.

    

2. Skimming

   When you skim a text, you read it quickly to get the gist of it, or its main idea. You are not concerned about understanding every small detail at this stage - you just want an overview. Skimming is an activity that asks you to read the text quickly and identify the main ideas, usually by focusing on the first and last sentences of each paragraph.
   
   

3. Scanning

   Scanning is also a form of quick reading, but it is different from skimming. Scanning is what you do when you want to find a specific piece of information. Scanning is a type of activity where you look for specific information in a text, such as names or dates.
   
   

4. Careful reading

   Many times, it is not enough to skim a text quickly. You will need to read it carefully to make sure you understand it properly. Careful reading, also called intensive reading, allows you to understand a text deeply and find relationships between the ideas presented there. When you understand a text well, you will be able to interpret, or explain, the information you read and summarize it using your own words.

Here are some things to keep in mind when reading intensively:

• Don't try to read carefully without skimming first. Have a general idea of what the text is about before you dive right in.
• Ask yourself what you want to learn from the reading. In other words, why are you reading it?
• Read with a pen or highlighter in your hand. You can underline or highlight important points, write notes in the margin, or otherwise mark up the text.
• Don't forget to review what you have read. It is easy to spend hours reading something, and then, when you are done, to not have a clue what you have just read. Repeat the information in the reading back to yourself or to someone else.

This tutorial reviews these active reading strategies and their importance for college students.

Be a Thoughtful Reader

The strategies above - predicting, skimming, scanning, and careful reading - are designed to help you to understand what you are reading. However, you also need to think about what you are reading.

When you read thoughtfully, you ask yourself questions like these:

• What kind of text is this? Is it from a textbook, a magazine, or a website?
• Who wrote it? What do I know about this writer?
• Why is the writer telling me this?
• Is the writer giving facts, or does the text present the writer's personal opinion?
• Can I trust the information contained in the text?
• How does this text compare to other things I have learned about the subject?
• How does it compare to my own experiences of the subject?

Now that we remember how to be active readers to improve our comprehension, let's look at the features of narrative texts.

Source: Adapted from Tania Pattison, https://www.nscc.ca/library/docs/copyright/oer/otb197-01-college-skills-intermediate-english.pdf; video from Academic Skills Unit
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.