READING SKILLS

IMPROVING COMPREHENSION SKILLS

 Read a Variety of Material
 Read a fairly long portion of the material

 Circle unknown or Unfamiliar words

 After reading, recall as much of the

information as possible. Jot down points
if you like.
 Consider how interesting the subject
matter is and how much you know about
the subject.
TECHNIQUES FOR GOOD
COMPREHENSION
 Skimming and Scanning
 Non-verbal signals

 Structure of the text

 Structure of Paragraphs

 Punctuation

 Author’s Viewpoint (inference)

 Reader’s anticipation: Determining the

meaning of words
 Summarizing

 Typical reading comprehension question

SKIMMING
Before starting to read the text in detail, you
should take a moment to preview the text. Read
quickly without pausing to study the details. This
is called skim reading or skimming. You should
understand:
For which audience the text was written
What type of text it is
What the purpose of the author is
The general contents of the author.
SCANNING
 After having skimmed the text, you can study it in more
detail, reading more slowly and carefully and looking for
specific information that you are interested in
NON-VERBAL SIGNS
 Look at the Layout features. For example:
Heading, Title, subheading, photographs,
Captions, Divisions into paragraphs, Figures,
graphs, bar, charts, etc.
STRUCTURE OF THE TEXT
 Title, subtitle
 Introduction

 The body (discussion)

 Conclusion
STRUCTURE OF THE PARAGRAPHS

 A summary
 Topic sentence,

 Provides
 Support for
 the topic sentence
PUNCTUATIONS
 Be particular about commas, colon and semi-colon.
I am going to Patna; soon I will visit the temple

As follows:
AUTHOR’S VIEWPOINT
 Words like luckily show approval.
 The words like unfortunately, unexpectedly, regrettably,
pity, desirable, to be disappointed etc show displeasure
 To show level of certainty author’s use words like
certain, obviously, undoubtedly, naturally, always, often,
likely, probably, maybe, unlikely, hardly, rarely, and
never.
READER ANTICIPATION
 Determine the word i.e, a verb, a noun, an adjective, an
adverb, etc.
 Determine its function in the sentence,

 Analyse contextual clues

 Is there any relation between this word and a word that is

familiar to you?
 Try and derive the eventual meaning of the word.
PREDICTING THE CONTENT
 Familiarize yourself with the subject of the passage by
glancing rapidly.
 Guess the information through the linguistic/graphic
clues
 Recall related information

 Use background information related to the topic to

accelerate the prediction process