Developing reading skills and strategies

Аннотация

This article deals the process of reading, students will be concerned with the subject-content of what they read and the language in which it is expressed. Both aspects involve comprehension, though of different kinds. Depending on the reading purpose, different strategies and skills will be involved. Key words: Reading skills, intensive reading, types of texts, reading strategies, linguistic competence. 186 Advanced students who are literate in their own language sometimes are “left to their own devices” when it comes to teaching them reading skills. They will simply learn good reading by absorption. In reality, there is much to be gained by focusing on reading skills. It is generally recognized that the efficient reader versed in ways of interacting with various types of texts, is flexible, and chooses appropriate reading strategies depending on a particular text in question. The reader has to match reading skill to reading purpose. We can differ between reading aloud and silent reading. Reading aloud is not appropriate for advanced students. We can use it when we have control reading. At the advanced level the most suitable is silent reading. Sustained silent reading allows students to develop a sense of fluency. Also silent reading can help the students to increase the speed of their reading. Reading speed is usually not much of an issue for all but the most advanced students. It is now generally accepted that reading is not the careful recognition and comprehension of each word on the page in sequence. A good reader use a minimum of ‘clues’ from the text to reconstruct the writer’s message. It is not difficult for the fluent reader to read the text with missing words. Experiments have shown that sometimes readers are not even aware of these things. Their successful reading depends upon their ability to predict what comes next. We read, in sense, what we expect to read, using our knowledge of language and our knowledge of the topic to predict to a large degree what comes next and so move on quickly [3,144]. Fluent advanced readers possess many different skills which they apply actively to the reading of the text: - they predict from syntactic and semantic clues the words; - they read in phrases, not in single words and actually skip over words if these are not needed for general understanding; - they learn to read ‘between the lines’ and working on the meaning of the text at different levels, understanding information, making inferences and critically evaluating ideas; - they guess the meaning of new words from contextual clues or by applying knowledge of how words can be formed from others; - they follow meaning through the paragraph by recognizing signals like ‘however’ and ‘on the other hand’ and by understanding how words and phrases like ‘it’, ‘this’, ‘the latter’ and ‘these matters’ refer back to something earlier in the text [4,128]. “Successful reading depends on the interaction of reading ‘strategies’ for ‘processing’ the text, background knowledge and linguistic competence” [6,57]. Silent reading may be subcategorized into intensive and extensive 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, implication, rhetorical relationships. Intensive reading practiced in class needs to be complemented by extensive reading in or out of class. It is important to be sure that students have ample time for extensive reading. Only then students are given the opportunity to operate strategies like prediction or guessing word meaning and to develop the ability to follow the lines of argument. It is carried out to achieve a general understanding of a text. All pleasure reading is extensive. Technical, scientific, and professional reading can also be extensive. 187 The idea that some words in the text may be skipped or ignored will certainly seem strange to students accustomed to plodding word by word; but the techniques of skimming and scanning require this [5,34]. These terms are sometimes used indiscriminately, but we will distinguish them below. Skimming consists of quickly running one’s eyes across the whole text to get the gist. It gives the learners the advantage of being able to predict the purpose of the passage, the main topic or message, and possibly some of developing or supporting ideas. This gives them a ‘head start’ as they embark on more focused reading. Scanning – is quickly searching for some particular piece or pieces of information in a text. Scanning exercises may ask students to look for names or dates, to find the definition of some concept. The purpose of scanning is to extract certain specific information without reading through the whole text. Skimming and scanning are useful skills. They do not remove the need for careful