understood. Post-reading activities often requires students to use text information in other tasks e.g., reading to write. Some commonly used post-reading activities
are: Completing a graphic organizer e.g., table, chart, grid based on text
information Expanding or changing a semantic map created earlier
Listening to a lecture and comparing information from the text based on a set of sentences provided
Answering questions that demonstrate comprehension of the text, require the application of the text material, demand a critical stance on
text information, or oblige students to connect text information to personal experiences and opinions
In order to achieve comprehension, students also need to learn more on reading skills such as skimming, scanning, previewing, predicting, etc. Besides
those activities discussed above, there are some other activities that support some reading skills. They will be discussed in detail on the next part, reading skills and
strategies.
c. Reading Skills and Strategies
Reading skills and strategies are regarded as major factor that lead to a success in comprehending message in a text. Hollas 2002 as cited in Duarte,
Bikner Victor 2009 suggests that a reading skill is a helpful tool that a student practices in order to improve reading while a reading strategy is a plan or way of
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doing something; a specific procedure one uses to perform a skill. Therefore, the writer is going to discuss some reading skills as follows:
1 Previewing
A preview is a quick and easy way to find out what a text will be about before reading it. This skill helps students decide if they need to read a particular
text or not, it also helps them decide what the text will be about before reading it. If the information they want does not look like it will be in the text then they
should not bother reading it. Example activities to build previewing skill: Look at the cover of a book and guess what the story will be about.
Examine the title or the front page of an article and guess what it will be about.
2 Predicting
Predicting involves using cues in the text to guess what is going to come next. Understanding the context of they have already read help students to make
predictions. They can also use the illustrations, vocabulary or the grammatical structure to guess what is coming next. Example activities to build predicting
skill: Stop reading part way through a story and ask the students to guess what
will happen next. Cloze exercises have some words missing from the context. Students have
to use their understanding of the content of the text to guess the missing words and ideas.
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3 Skimming
Skimming consists of quickly running one‟s eyes across a whole text such as an essay, article, or chapter for its gist. Skimming gives readers the advantage
of being able to predict the purpose of the passage, the main topic, or message and possibly some of the developing or supporting ideas Brown, 2001: 308.
Some activities to practice skimming as suggested by Leane, Shirley 2002 include:
Match the titles of newspaper articles with the stories. As the students‟ ability improves, limit the time allowed to do the activity. This could be
used as part of a media unit, or perhaps when they are learning to write recounts.
Match the greetings and final paragraphs with the main part of a letter. Use 3 or 4 letters with the different sections jumbled up. This could be
used in a letter writing unit – use letters of the same style that you are
teaching the students to write. Give the students a list of the key words that they will find in the text that
they are about to read. The students read through the list of words and then give their ideas what they think the article will be about. After expressing
their ideas, let them skim the text with a time limit and then compare their ideas with what they read in the text. This activity is extremely useful
when introducing a new topic of study. It helps prepare the students for the topic that they are about to study and makes the reading of the text much
easier.
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Show the students a newspaper headline and ask them to predict what the article will be about. As in the previous example, once they have made
their predictions ask them to skim the text to check how accurate they were.
Give the students a variety of emails and ask them to identify which ones are junk mail spam and which ones should be kept for later in-depth
reading.
4 Scanning
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
date, to find a definition of a key concept, or to list a certain number of supporting details. The purpose of scanning is to extract specific information without reading
through the whole text Brown, 2001: 308. Leane, Shirley 2002 suggests some examples of activities to practice
scanning include: Give the students a train timetable and ask them to find out what time the
train leaves a particular station. They only need to scan the timetable to find the information they want - the rest of the timetable is not relevant.
Alternatively, they could search the Internet, for timetables and hotel information, to plan a trip.
Give each student a copy of a TV schedule from an English language newspaper. Ask them to find out what time a certain TV program starts
and finishes.
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Look at the contents page of a textbook to find the page number of a particular section. Alternatively at the beginning of the year, give the
students an exercise to orientate them to their new textbook, e.g. „How many units are there?‟ „Which unit reviews past tense?‟ „Where is…..‟
Scan a biography or an encyclopedia to find specific factual information such as date of birth, important events and places.
Use a dictionary to find the meaning of a particular word. Look at a weather report and decide if they need to carry an umbrella
tomorrow or not.
d. Reading with Comprehension
