Reading is one of the simplest things for a literate person. At the same time, learning to read is one of the most challenging things for the same person. While we take the process of reading for granted, when we go into the nitty-gritty, reading is not as simple as it looks.
For instance, there are different types of reading and applications of reading, and depending on the application of reading, the method of homework will vary. At the same time, your reading technique and skills will also determine the level of information you retain from your reading session.
Have you ever encountered a situation where you read something but go back and re-read it because you couldn’t remember anything? If you do, you should know that building proper reading skills is extremely important for anybody, especially if you are involved in academics.
But the question remains, how do you build reading skills? Are there any good techniques for building reading skills?
Yes, there are. There are several techniques for building reading skills, and each has its own set of applications, advantages, and disadvantages. If you are just starting on this journey of learning to read, these techniques for building reading skills might be a bit hard, but as you progress and start applying them in your daily life, it won’t take long before they become your second nature. The best part about these techniques is that once you get the basics, you can apply them to any language.
Because of this, you should give this a read if you want to take a foreign language course, be it Japanese Language, English Language, Arabian Language or German Language course.
But what are the techniques? Let’s get started!
1) Scanning
This is a straightforward technique where you simply run your eyes over the text without actually having the intention of reading anything. The crucial words would attract your eyes, and you get a general gist of the context through a few words.
However, to improve your reading skills by scanning, you should have a general idea of the content and the context of the text. This reading technique is meant for everyday readers that don’t contain important information, such as spam mails, brochures, and such.
2) Skimming
This reading technique is just a step above scanning in terms of simplicity and lack of reading involved. In this reading technique, you search the keywords in a text and read the text surrounding the keywords for an overall understanding. Naturally, to execute this technique, you will need to have a good idea of what to look for in a text.
You can easily guess that skimming is not a good technique for building in-depth reading skills. However, it is an excellent technique for learning how to find the keywords and core elements of a familiar passage.
Skimming is the perfect technique for building your reading skill to quickly go through service/product reviews, do quick research, and for short reviews before exams.
3) Active Reading
With skimming, we finally enter the realm of real reading techniques for building your reading skills and the ones you can implement at the beginner level. You may have already guessed from the reading techniques I mentioned before that both of them require a decent amount of comprehension before you can implement them.
However, you won’t need to have any prior understanding of Active reading. This is a simple technique for building your reading skill: take a notepad and a highlighter pen and start reading the text while actively noting the keywords and essential phrases. If you think this sounds familiar, you would be correct as almost everybody has learned of this technique during our school days.
Active reading is simple, intuitive, and one of the best reading techniques for building your reading skills since it requires you to actively participate and get involved with the entire text.
That said, if you do not understand the specific words, you can go with the general context of the text to fill in the meaning of the said word in this reading technique.
4) Detailed Reading
Also known as “read-to-word” in many writers and reading circles, detailed reading is the most tedious and time-consuming technique. Why?
Because to execute this reading technique, you need to:
- read each word in a text
- understand the meaning of every word
- know the present and possible context of every word
- visualize the action, object, sound, and trait of every word in a text
Given that any average text can be a few hundred to a thousand words long, doing this for every single word will take a long time. That said, Detailed reading is one of the best techniques to understand and comprehend the full context and content of the text.
Naturally, you would not use the Detailed Reading technique for every text. I only recommend using this reading technique if you need to read a new text that requires a high degree of understanding or is highly complicated and peculiar. This includes texts such as scholarly research articles, medical reports, and poetic literature where misunderstanding a single word can drastically affect your understanding.
This is also one of the best reading techniques to build your vocabulary.
5) SPE reading technique
SPE or Structure-preposition-evaluation is a reading technique first proposed by Mortimer Adler in one of his books back in 1940. In this technique, you must actively read the entire text, analyze its layout, find the structure, and analyze it before coming to your conclusions.
As you can see from the steps involved, the SPE reading technique is an excellent technique for providing you with a clear understanding of the context and the context of the text you are reading. Along with this, this technique is also suitable for getting ideas about writing a well-structured article or a literary piece.
SPE is among the tedious techniques for building your reading skill. But, it is still nowhere as tedious as read-to-word and is more versatile.
6) SQ3R reading technique
Before judging the name, skim the contents of this passage a bit first. I mentioned how to skim earlier, so it should not be hard for you by now.
The name of this reading technique is based on the initials of the steps involved. They are:
- Survey: Get a quick idea of the context by scanning the text or reading the title
- Question: Prepare questions as you actively read the paragraphs regarding the text
- Read: Read the text with the questions in your mind (or in a notebook).
- Recite: Go back and try to answer your previous questions in the text (yes, the answers should be correct or at the very least sensible ones)
- Review: Keep notes about what you learned from the entire text and either recite them internally or externally
Some of you may know this technique as the “high school learning technique” or “University learning technique,” as most higher education institutes implement this reading technique to simplify complex learning subjects.
In The End
The conclusion is simple: learn to read hard. The techniques I have mentioned here are the best reading techniques for their said purpose. Scanning is best for reading mundane and unimportant texts; skimming is excellent for finding the key points. Along with this, active reading and SQ3R are best for academic reading, and you will not find a better technique than detailed reading that enables you to understand complicated texts.
If you want to learn forgeign languages with Japanese language consultancy, or German Language Consultancy, you can better prepare yourself by practicing these techniques
You can train and practice these techniques alone, but they only shine when you can fluently use and switch between them depending on your needs. For this, you will need to read a lot.
There is no shortcut to perfecting these techniques since reading is a form of art similar to sketching or writing, and the core of every art is learning the theory and practicing to perfection.
I hope you found this insightful and helpful. And as always, thank you for reading till the end.
Casey is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. She has more than 4 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Casey holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 50 companies in different industries. She blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and her work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Casey on Twitter and LinkedIn.