Reading is an art and it is acquired by practice. The process of acquiring the art of reading is accelerated if a guide or mentor helps a reader or a student on acquiring the art of reading in the right way. The teacher must keep in mind that there are different techniques of reading and the students while reading should be well guided to choose the right techniques that suit the text. Using the right reading technique in the appropriate text is indeed crucial particularly in an exam context when there are time constraints and you have to make a difficult choice to adopt a specific reading technique within a short span of time. Choose the best Easy French Books for best reading using the appropriate reading techniques.
The reading technique is broadly divided into four basic categories. They are, (1) skimming, (2) scanning, (3) intensive, and (4) extensive. The skimming is referred to as kind of summary or gist reading. The skimming helps to understand what the entire text is about. This normally applicable when you read a magazine or a newspaper. You go through the magazine or newspaper just to choose the ones which you may go through in details. So, you skim a magazine or a newspaper in order to shortlist your favourite topics or articles. Similarly, you skim your phone book to choose the appropriate number for dialling. You can develop the skills of skimming. If you go on practising skimming you can achieve 70 words per minutes. However, your understanding of overall content through skimming is comparatively very slow as well as superficial.
Scanning is something like visiting a historical city with a guide book at hand and you do a quick scan which site to visit. Scanning involves quickly go through the sentences and try to gather the required information. So, in scanning, you get the meaning of the text and understand what the topic is about. You need to give importance to the illustrations because it helps in scanning the entire article and get the meaning quickly.
Intensive reading is going through it and bit of the text. Keep in mind that intensive reading is more time taking than the skimming and scanning. For example, if you need to list a chronology in a long passage, you need to read it intensively which may take a long time.
Extensive reading generally is done for pleasure. Students hardly do the extensive reading because it not only consumes a lot of time, but it may involve uninteresting text and you may have to divert the reading to find meanings of words which you may come across frequently.
