Reading skills and methods play a very important role in our daily English reading or work. When we read some books & newspaper in spare time or start translation work, we always need to browse the whole text roughly in advance to grasp general idea, and how to make an effective reading in limited time? There are two reading skills to share as below.
1. fast extensive reading
We should develop a habit of fast extensive reading usual. Extensive reading mentioned here refers to a large number of widely reading books in different areas, it required to read more faster, understand and grasp the main contents of the book or text. To determine a clear reading norm which according to their characteristics, may be more or less, but should be feasible.
2. skimming
Skimming also known as skip reading (reading and skipping) or glancing, which is a specialized, very useful fast reading skills. Skimming here refers to the reading as fast as possible, as the bird’s eye view from the plane see a clear sign on the ground, can quickly grasp the main idea or central idea of text. In other words, skimming is to ask the reader to read with selectivity, you can skip some details, in order to catch the article’s general outline, thus improve the reading speed. According to the statistics, a well-trained reader (skimmer) of the reading speed can reach an amount about 3000-4000 per minute.
There are some techniques of skimming as below.
To take advantage of typegraphical details, such as a book or article’s title, subtitle, subhead, italicized words, bold words, footnotes, punctuation, etc., and then make a preview skimming to the books and articles. Forecast the skimming require understand the author’s ideas, articles manner (mode) in order to take a clear idea, the details and their relationship of text.
(2)With the general reading speed (200 ~ 250wpm) to read the article at the beginning of first section and second section, and trying to catch the article’s general idea, background, style, tone or expression and so on.
(3)Read the topic sentence and conclusion sentences of the paragraph. Catch the topic sentence of paragraph means master the general idea of paragraph, then not need to read the details in order to obtain skimming’s speed.
(4)We can make a brief note as well as reading a book. We can write down key words, difficult word or hot words. All these words can help you to understand what the book want to say. However before you want to understand what it says, you should check the words’ meaning clearly that you never saw previous, which will concentrate your attention on the book.
In summary, there analyses the importance of reading, we should training the reading abilities of cultural background and reading in all, and make better reading habits in order to improve the reading technique and approaches.