Unit 5 - Reading

What is reading?

Reading is one of the four language skills: Reading, writing, listening and speaking. It is a receptive skill, like listening. This means it involves responding to text, rather than producing it. Very simply we can say that reading involves making sense of written text. To do this we need to understand the language of the text at word level, sentence level or whole-text level. We also need to connect the message of the text to our knowledge of the world. Look at this sentence, for example: the boy was surprised because the girl was much faster at running than he was.to understand this sentence, we need to understand what the letters are, how the letters join together to make words, what the words mean and the grammar of the words and the sentence. But we also make sense of this sentence by knowing that, generally speaking, girls do not run as fast as boys. Our knowledge of the world helps us understand why the boy was surprised.

Scan	We don’t read the whole text. We glance over most of it until we find the information we are interested in.
Skimming	Glancing through a text to get a general idea of what it is about.
Reading for detail	It involves getting the meaning out of every word and out of the links or relationships between words and between sentences.
Inferring	Use to get meaning from a text. We notice what words, register, grammar or style the writer has used to refer to something.
Deducing meaning from context	Reading the words around an unknown word or thinking about the situation the unknown word is used in to try and work out its meaning.
Predicting	Using clues before we begin reading, to guess what a text may be about.
Text structure	Involves understanding how certain types of text generally develop.

Reference:

Spratt, M., Pulverness, A., & Williams, M. (2012). The TKT Teaching Knowledge Test Course Modules 1,2 and 3 (Vol. Second edition). United Kingdom: Cambridge English.