When you are skimming, be sure to move rapidly through the material, skipping the information you are already familiar with. You may wish to read the
first and the last sentences of each paragraph because that is often where the main ideas are located. Read the introduction and the summary if one is provided.
When examples are given, you may want to read a few of them until you understand the concepts they are meant to illustrate. When skimming a textbook
chapter, glance quickly at the title, subheadings, italicized words, boldface print, and illustrations.
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5. Skills in Reading a. Predictive Skill
The efficient reader predicts what he is going to read and the process of understanding the text is the process of seeing how the content of the text matches
up to these predictions. In the first instance his predictions will be the result of the expectation he has. As he continues to read, however, his predictions will change
as he receives more information from the text.
b. Extracting specific information
Very often the reader is involved in the use of receptive skills for the sole purpose of extracting specific information. In other words the reader may look at a
piece of written language not in order to understand it all, but for the purpose of
finding out only one or two facts. This skill when applied to reading is often
called scanning. c. Getting the general picture
Reader often read to something because they want to get the general picture. In other words they want to read something and as a result of their reading have a
general idea of the main points of what they have read: it is the main point that they are interested in, not the detail. Indeed the skill of reading in order to get the
general picture, called skimming, presupposes the reader‘s ability to pick out the main points and discard what is irrelevant, or what is only detail. The reader is
able to skim rapidly over information that is repeated more than once.
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Ibid., p. 531
d. Inferring opinion and attitude A reader often has to be able to work out what the writer opinions and
attitudes are, particularly since they are not always directly stated. The experienced reader will know, from various clues he receives while reading,
whether the writer approves of the topic he is discussing, or whether his opinion of the personality he is describing is favourable or not. The ability to infer opinion
and attitude is largely based on the recognition of linguistic style and its use to achieve appropriate purposes.
e. Deducing meaning from context Even native speaker often come across words in written text that they do not
understand. Most usually, however, the fact that a word is unknown to them does not cause any particular problem. Based on the context in which the word occurs
the native speaker guesses its meaning. Usually, too, his guess will be right. The point is that the deducing of meaning is important for a language user who will
often meet unknown words. It should be said that for a native speaker there is a point at which they are not able to deduce meaning from context where there are a
great number of word that they do not understand. f. Recognizing function and discourse patterns and markers
Native speakers know that when they read ‗for example‘ this phrase will be followed by an example. When they read ‗in other word‘ a concept will be
explained in a different way. Recognizing such discourse markers is an important part of understanding how a text is constructed. It is important to know, for
example, which sentence in a paragraph is a generalization and which sentence then backs up that generalization with evidence. It is also important to be able to
recognize devices for cohesion and understand how a text is organized coherently.
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12
Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Language Teaching. New York: Longman Inc., 1989, pp. 144
—145.
