Skimming and scanning Skimming and scanning are necessary for fast and efficient reading.

Skimming involves reading for an overall understanding of the text. The reader is quickly running ones eyes through a text to get its essence, its general idea or gist. Reading a few sentences, recognising a few words and expressions, a few main point(s) and the function(s) may be enough. However, skimming involves some interpretation. For instance, a reader may skim the review of a book to see if the reviewer thinks it is good or bad. Practice in skimming will show your students how much they can find out simply by looking at the prominent elements of a text, by catching a few words or by reading fragments. To train your students in skimming, you can remove a few sentences from a text or even whole paragraphs making sure those parts contain only supporting details and ask the students to supply the missing parts. Scanning is quickly going through a text to find particular information. Readers look quickly through the text to find words that answer their specific questions. For example, we may scan the TV times in search of a certain film, to see on what channel it is on and when it is scheduled. Scanning is a visual skill more than an interpretive one. When you practice scanning in the classroom, make sure that you give your students clear instructions as to what they need to find out. For example, if you ask them to scan advertisements for ideas on where to spend a holiday, they would need to find out about accommodation, prices, meals, contact names and addresses, etc. Your students will need practice in both skimming and scanning, as it is usual to make use of both when reading a text. Intensive, extensive, scan and skim reading do not exclude one another. We often skim through a text to see what it is about before deciding whether it is worth scanning for specific information. In real life, our reading purposes constantly vary, and we need various approaches to cope with our needs. That is why your students need practice in different ways of reading. Their choice of reading style will depend on the nature of the text and the purpose they have in reading it. The three-stages approach to teaching reading R. White suggests three stages and a general procedure for a reading lesson: he recommends the use of pre-, while- and postreading activities. The procedure relies on the students knowledge of language and knowledge of the world and uses this as a basis for involvement, motivation and progress. It also leads to the integration of language skills.
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Pre-reading activities are meant to introduce and arouse interest in the topic, to motivate the pupils by giving them a reason for reading and to provide some language preparation for the text. In real life, we usually have a purpose in reading: something we want to find out, to check or clarify. We also have a purpose in reading when we read stories for pleasure: we want to find out how the story develops, what happens next. Moreover, we always have some idea of what we are going to read about, and as we read we address the writer's questions in our mind. Based on these, we may be able to make a number of predictions or guesses. Headlines, chapter headings or book titles often make us think about the text before we begin to read. In the classroom, it is important to give the pupils some reason for reading or problems to which they want to find the answer. These may consist in questions for them to think about as they read. (The answers will be discussed afterwards.) These questions are called guiding/signpost questions. e.g., What would you like to know about? Write down at least five questions, which you hope the text will answer. or You are going to read a text about. Here are some words and phrases from the text. Can you guess how they are used in the text? Another type of pre-reading activity may be true false questions: the pupils are given sentences that refer to the text, and they guess whether they are true or false. Alternatively, they are given a summary of the text with gaps; their task is to guess what words should go in the gaps. They may also be given the topic of the text and may be asked to write a list of things they know and things they do not know about the topic. If the text puts forward an opinion, the pupils discuss the topic beforehand and give their own point of view. Although you are not supposed to teach every word or structure in the text that you think your pupils are not familiar with, you should ensure that your pupils would be able to do the text tasks without being hindered by language difficulties. On the other hand, language preparation can be carried out by the pupils themselves. The use of visuals, such as photographs, maps, diagrams, the drawing up of lists and the setting or answering of questions (oral or written) may all be part of pre-reading. While-reading activities usually start from a general understanding of the text and then move to smaller units: paragraphs, sentences and words. The larger units provide a context for the smaller ones. The activities aim at

helping the pupils understand the writers purpose, text structure and content. The traditional comprehension questions placed either at the end, at the beginning or inserted at various points within the text, are a typical example of a while-reading activity. Completing diagrams or maps, making lists and taking notes are other types of while-reading work. Post-reading activities enable the pupils to consolidate and reflect upon their reading and to relate it to their own knowledge, interests or views. Post-reading activities may deal with reactions to the text and to the whilereading work. The pupils may be asked to say whether they liked the text and the activities or not, or whether they found them useful or not. Other post-reading activities are: writing an outline of a paragraph or longer text; drawing a list of main ideas from the text and then working individually or in pairs to locate supporting details; matching, in pair or group work, a column with main ideas from a passage with a column of details; underlining generalisations and supporting details or creating topic sentences for portions of the text; determining the function of each sentence in a paragraph or longer text (stating a generalisation, supporting it, catching and holding the readers attention, etc.); choosing a main idea (or best title) for a passage from among several choices or creating one on their own; doing a jigsaw* reading in which the pupils are given different parts of a text, and working together to create a logical sequence. Each of the pupils is given a sentence or a passage from a text and they have to look for significant details that will give them clues to the development of the whole text. Using these text indicators (referring either back to something mentioned before or announcing something to come), each pupil has to interact with the others until they find out where their passage belongs in the text. Exploring the relationship of ideas in a text can be carried out at almost any proficiency level. Beginners can develop semantic maps that are entirely schematic, containing basic words or no writing, with pictures. e.g. semantic map of house Sub-Skills Involved in Reading Due to its complexity, reading is often analysed into a set of component subskills (both lower and higher level) and knowledge areas: Recognition;
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Knowledge of the language; Knowledge of formal text structure; Content and background knowledge; Cognitive processing; Metacognitive knowledge and skills monitoring Recognition sub-skills These consist of the abilities of recognising the sounds and the script of a language, deducing the meaning and use of unfamiliar words, understanding information both explicitly stated and implicit. The pupils must be able to recognise the English script, the combinations of letters in the spelling of words and be able to recognise words. They should not waste time working out each word or group of words, even if they may not know all of the words in the text they are reading. Knowledge of the language This means understanding conceptual meaning, the relations within the sentence, the communicative function of sentences, the relations between the parts of a text and cohesion devices. Your pupils will need strategies for dealing with unknown words. Reaching for the dictionary is not always a good idea. Explain to your pupils that they will meet three kinds of unknown words: key words, words that can be ignored and words that can be guessed. The words that are not significant for a general understanding of the text can be ignored. Key words, however, need to be understood; you either preteach them or recommend the use of a dictionary. In the third category, there are words whose meanings can be inferred from the context, and your pupils should be given practice in doing this. They can be convinced of the value of guessing from context if you provide simple texts in which nonsense words are used. Consider the following sentences: a. When their car broke down, the whole family had to strack home a distance of two hundred metres in the rain. b. After their walk, the children were so zlopped that they needed a hot bath and then they went straight to plenk. c. The following gart they woke up feeling all right It is quite easy to guess the meanings of the nonsense words in these sentences, and for general understanding it does not really matter whether gart is morning or day. Discovering the meaning of unfamiliar items, making use of contextual* clues (syntactic, logical and cultural) is called inferring. When you use a new text, you do not always need to explain the difficult words and structures beforehand.
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You can encourage your pupils to guess the meaning of unknown items, based on word-formation or context*. Efficient readers generally read in groups of words, without looking at everything in a given piece of writing and going for the overall meaning of a text. Knowledge of text structure This involves knowledge of how a text is organised, of the rhetorical structures and conventions and of specific logical patterns. Your pupils must know the language of the text they are reading: the content words and what they mean, though perhaps not all of them. Also, they must know the syntax and the effect of structural words, of word form and of word order. A competent reader of English is aware that a sentence like She shouldnt have been there at that time cannot stand alone and must refer to a situation already mentioned in an earlier part of the text. The identity of she must already be known, and the place and time signalled by there and at that time must have been specified already. Exercises in which pupils are asked to search for and underline or circle cohesive pairs in a text are recommended. It is also important to train your pupils to look first at the basic sentence pattern (subject + verb) and then at the other elements and their contribution to sentence meaning. To practise this, you can ask them to divide passages into sense groups and analyse the important elements. Another important ability is that of recognising and interpreting discourse markers, such as then, next, after this, which show the sequence in which events occur. Other markers, such as for example, all in all, as already noted, indicate that the writer is exemplifying, summing up or referring to a point made previously. However and moreover signal that the writer is making an adjustment to a previous statement or adding further evidence. You need to teach your pupils to recognise the various devices used to link sentences and ideas. You may offer them exercises in recognising the function of connectors*, finding equivalents, completing texts with the missing link-words, transforming disconnected sentences into text by joining sentences and adding connectors. Understanding the meaning of individual sentences is important but insufficient. Your pupils should be able to recognise the purpose of the text as a whole, to see how it is organised and to understand the relationship between sentences. They should be able to follow the writer, see how the sentences and the paragraphs are related to each other and make sense of the text. Content and background knowledge
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This involves prior knowledge of content, background or culture. All readers bring their knowledge of the world to a text: life experience, familiarity with a particular topic and with different text types but also knowledge of a particular culture or way of life. Whether knowledge of the world will help your pupils to understand the text, will depend on the nature of the text and their knowledge. The cultural background of your pupils, if different from that of the writer, may cause additional difficulties in understanding a text. If you want your pupils to be able to read a text effectively, you have to provide such knowledge or enable them to access it in some way before the reading. However, you do not need to prepare your pupils for everything that they will encounter in the text. Very often reading also means learning. You also need to encourage higher-level interpretation subskills, as reading involves the formulation of constant guesses or predictions that are either rejected or confirmed later. The reading activities should cultivate the pupils ability to recognise the purpose of the text as a whole, text organisation, and to think ahead, hypothesise and predict text development. Cognitive processing sub-skills The ability to interpret a text involves hypothesising, the drawing of inferences and the resolution of ambiguities and uncertainties; prediction, evaluation of information, and synthesis. Predicting is guessing based on grammatical, structural, logical and cultural clues. Predictions are crucial in anticipation and skimming. You can train your pupils in predicting by giving them unfinished passages to complete or by stopping after each sentence and asking them to say what is likely to come next (e.g., What do you think will happen next? , What do you think the next words will be? or What do you think the next sentence will be about?) To help them, you can give three possible continuations and ask them to choose the one they think is most likely to follow. Another idea is to remove all punctuation from a text and ask the pupils to put it back. Anticipating is inherent in the process of reading, which is a permanent dialogue between the reader and the text. The readers usually start reading a text prepared to find answers to their expectations. These expectations are as important as what they actually draw from the text. To give your pupils an incentive for reading, before starting reading a text, you can ask them to look for answers to specific questions. You can also make them ask questions themselves. You can use key words, the title and the accompanying pictures to talk about various ways in which the text may develop, e.g., Look at the pictures and guess what the text is about. Metacognitive knowledge and skills monitoring
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Metacognitive knowledge is knowledge about cognition and language. It includes awareness of the mental processes which are involved in different kinds of learning. Pupils are capable of becoming aware of and of monitoring their own mental processes and of choosing the most efficient learning strategies. Metacognitive knowledge includes abilities like recognising text structure and organisation, using a dictionary, taking notes and so on. Previewing and recognising problems with the information presented in the text, are further examples of such learning strategies. Previewing involves the use of the table of contents, the appendix, the preface and the headings in order to find the information needed. It is used in skimming, scanning and as a study skill. Pupils need to be made aware that there is not just one way of reading as they do not always recognise this. Their instincts are to read every reading text thoroughly and try to understand every word. This will not improve their reading ability, because this is not the way people read in real life. Therefore, your first task is to persuade your pupils that there are different ways of reading for different purposes and that they need to practise different reading techniques.