Reading skills for today’s adult, the term on its own might sound a bit crazy. We all know reading as one of the basic cognitive skills that anyone called literate must have acquired. However, there is more than just these basic skills, that get us to fit in educational institutions. We need more strategies and techniques of reading, if we are to built confidence and succeed academically. They involve the use of the symbolic cognitive capacity to understand, analyze, evaluate and to think about different modalities of real problem-solving.
One of the uses of reading skills, is in the study. In other words, they are part of the study skills whereby you employ your symbolic capacity to transfer the knowledge in your knowledge bank. But how can we make the most of this capacity to be more successful academically or in real-life problem-solving? Every skill requires a strategy and special techniques to stay ahead of yourself, your natural challenges and competitors.
Skimming
This is one of the reading skills for today’s adult consisting of a quick screening to get an overview of the message covered in the text. Skimming will give you the first impression of the whole content in the book or the material you are reading. In this phase, you capture the main ideas of every paragraph and the different subheadings in the content and take not of their general links before you can undertake the deep grasp of it.
Scanning
Scanning involves targeting a certain piece of information in the text and browse through to find it. In this case, you don’t need to reading every word or detail. However, you may need to browse more in the paragraph that word is found to further put it in the context.
Critical Reading
This is one of the types of reading skills, in which you will have to undertake a deep reading of the content. This is meant not only to give you a deep understanding of the content, but also to analyze the author’s mind in the text. In this case, your aim is at a full understanding of the text and capturing the author’s intention or digest their opinion.
Detailed Reading
In detailed reading, you will need to understand the whole component of a book or piece of information. In this case you will have to carefully read the whole document and analyse it. The difference between detailed and critical reading is that in detailed one, you will have to go through the entire document, while in critical type, you may focus attention on a single or few parts of the document. Generally, when you are studying for an exam, the detailed reading comes after skimming and scanning.
Strategies to improve your reading skills
There are a good number of strategies that you can use to improve your skills, as part of reading skills for today’s adult, but here we shall concentrate on five major ones. These strategies according to researchers are not only meant for improving your skills, but also your critical thinking and systematic reasoning and analysis
Predicting
make sure you set a goal or target for your reading before your start, and throughout your reading work toward achieving that goal. This may be for instance, what kind of knowledge you would like to acquire in that piece of material.
Making connection
at this stage you connect the acquired knowledge through reading to your already set goal. Not only that, you also have to associate what you are reading to your already acquired knowledge, to the other parts of the text and to the world reality. This involves three main steps, namely: prediction, connection and conclusion.
Inferring
What you read one sentence you usually try to imagine what’s coming next. This kind of prediction, gives the opportunity to, not only enjoy what you are reading, but also to read faster and deeply understand it.
Questioning
This is the most interesting phase of reading whereby you now digest what you have read. To do this you try to ask yourself questions from the text you read in order to counter-check your goal achievement level. You kind of process the information or knowledge you acquired through reading the text, using a self-questioning technique. However, if you are lucky to have a study mate, this is the best time you can exchange questions to verify the level of mastery of the content you have read.
Summarizing
This is the final stage of your reading, which will give you a mental map of the entire content you have read. This is the map that you can use in the examination or test to answer the questions. It is this map which will guide you to where to find the answers relevant to the question asked in your paper. Furthermore, this map consists of the main ideas in the text you have read and their interconnections.
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