Reading Skills
This
week is National Library Week (NLW). What better time could there be to study
reading skills than this week?
1. To begin, consider your prior reading experience (both in your mother tongue and in foreign languages). Depending on our purpose in reading, we incorporate many skills into comprehending text. Does the way in which you read in the following situations differ?
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Situation
#1 -You are spending a relaxing afternoon reading the newspaper while sipping
on a latte at your favorite coffee shop. |
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Situation
#2 -You must read an article that your teacher has assigned to be read before
class that day. Class is in 15 minutes and you haven’t started reading. |
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Situation
#3 - You are reading poetry for a foreign language course. Your teacher told
you that you would have a quiz over the poetry the following week. |
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Situation
#4 - You are reading a chapter from your biology textbook and there are many
scientific words that are unfamiliar to you. |
Instructions:
Answer the questions in this table and compare your findings with those of your
classmates and the class as a whole.
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Do
you take notes in this situation? |
Do
you underline or highlight in this situation? |
Do
you look up words in the dictionary in this situation? |
On
a scale of 1-10, how high is your level of concentration when you read in
this situation? |
Estimate
how much you would remember about what you read in each situation (0-100%). |
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Situation
#1 |
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Situation
#2 |
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Situation
#3 |
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Situation
#4 |
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2.
Now, click here
to read a text about National Library Week. Print out the text and underline
any new or unfamiliar words (do not use your dictionaries to look them up!).
3.
Sometimes it is not necessary to be familiar with a dictionary definition to
understand the gist of a sentence. Habitually, the other words in the sentence
will supply us with a meaning for an unfamiliar word. Here are some suggestions
to help you accurately “guess” the
meaning of words you don’t understand:
a.
Identify
the part
of speech of the mystery word and focus on finding a definition that
matches that part of speech.
b.
Read
the sentence to yourself while omitting the word and see if you can insert
another work in its place. It might be that you find a synonym to the word
this way.
c.
Does
the word look like (or contain) a word that you do know?
Try
out these suggestions on some examples:
Ex
# 1: Sometimes it is not necessary to be familiar with a dictionary definition
to understand the gist of a sentence.
Ex
# 2: First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a
national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and
libraries across the country each April.
Ex # 3: Habitually, the other words in the sentence will supply
us with a meaning for an unfamiliar word.
Write
the bold words and the words that you underlined from the reading in left-hand
column of this table. Using suggestions a-c, fill in the remaining cells of the
table.
Words
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Part of Speech |
What
(if any) word(s) does this word remind you of? |
Implied (Guessed) meaning |
Dictionary meaning (click to open up an online dictionary) |
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noun |
none |
message |
the
main point or part |
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habit |
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4.
Now that you have filled in your chart, go to the library (NLW- remember?) and
find an article in a recent newspaper or magazine. Print or copy the article
and go through the same steps (underlining, filling out the chart, etc.) that
you did for the activity you just completed. When you have completed the chart,
write a short paragraph that both compares this strategy to your
reading strategy in your mother tongue and explains how useful you think
this strategy is. In the future, you might want to experiment with this
idea when reading your course texts.