What Skills are essential for Good Reading?
Reading and writing proficiency means the ability to identify, understand, express, create and interpret concepts, feelings, facts and opinions, orally and writes it.
When the writer, they begin writing with some purposes, therefore they choose and use their words, sentences and paragraphs to fulfill the purposes. Similarly, the reader’s goal is, to understand and absorb writers’ broad purposes. Reading is essentially a private or social activity, not a class one.
But in the second language learning most learners can`t be made effective readers unless they are taught how. To do this, teachers need a programmed which can deal with methodology, opportunities for practice, and appropriate facilities to help the learners acquire better reading techniques. Most reading material is written to achieve one or more purposes.
The main purposes in a writer`s mind are:
The author doesn’t just write what comes to mind. His story must be coherent. Once the subject has been chosen, this lover of words must do research on the place, the period, the social environment but also obtain technical, scientific information, etc.
1. To present information
2. To interpret information
3. To interpret human experience
4. To move the emotions
5. To stir the senses
6. To provide entertainment
7. Skills linked to the specificity of reading
8. Reading skills linked to language activity
9. Skills linked to lived experience, to the reader`s experience
Understanding a written test means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible. For example, we apply different reading strategies when looking at a notice board searching for some specific information, and when carefully reading an article of special interest in a scientific journal.
In the first case, a reader will quickly reject the irrelevant information and find what interests him. In the second case he has to read in detail and can`t afford to skin or scan the article, or to be more simple can`t skip paragraphs or pages.
In our everyday life, we come across many types of reading material:
Novels, short stories, other literary texts like diaries, Plays, poems, letters, telegrams, notes, biographies, articles, editorials, classified ads, weather forecasts, radio/T.V. programmed, summaries, précis, accounts, reports, reviews, business correspondence. Handbook, guide books, recipes, catalogues, travel brochures, puzzles, problems, instructions, directions, notices, rules and regulations, posters, signs, menus, price lists, tickets, comic strips, cartoons, legends, maps, diagrams, time tables, directions, dictionaries, etc.
We read all these things:
a) For pleasure, and
b) For information.
Some of us read just casually even while reading serious journals or reports, and some of us read seriously even while reading classified ads or cartoons.
These sorts of reading activities can be broadly divided into following two categories:
a) The Intensive reading
b) The Extensive reading
a) The extensive reading: Reading longer texts, usually for one`s own pleasure. This reading needs fluency. It is a sort of an outside reading.
b) Intensive reading: Reading shorter texts to extract specific information. This kind of reading needs accuracy for detail.
