Reading Strategies:
Surveying, Skimming and Scanning

As far as reading at university is concerned, the most important thing is for you to be aware of different strategies that are available to you and to use the correct one in the correct situation. It is a bad habit to start to read an academic text by going right to the beginning and continuing to read every sentence one after the other, looking up every word you don’t know in a dictionary.

Firstly you need to make sure that the text is something you want to read! Imagine you want to move to a new house, or you want to buy a new car and you go to see this new house/car to see if you want it. What is the first thing you do? Well, I think the first thing you do is look at it from the outside to see if it is what you want. Don’t you stand back and look at it from different angles to see if it meets your needs? If it looks OK, then you go inside and start to investigate it carefully.

Similarly with an academic text you have to make sure that it is what you want before you go inside it – that is, before you start reading it carefully. The ‘stand back and look at it from different angles’ is essential. This is when you look at the title, the author, when it was written (what we sometimes calling ’surveying’ the text) and you skim and scan it. When you scan a text you are looking through it quickly to find key words or information. After scanning a text you should know if it has references to things you want to know about. Skimming is looking quickly through a text to gain a general impression of what it is about. You can often do this by reading only the title and sub-titles of a text, and the first sentence of each paragraph.

You can do all this type of reading without using a dictionary! Remember the house – you haven’t stepped inside it yet, you are still looking at it from the outside. Surveying the text (title, author, date, etc) and skimming and scanning are essential academic reading skills for you and for native English speakers too who also need to develop these skills. The trick is to have the confidence to jump through a text ignoring whole bits of it. It may seem strange to you to do this. It may even feel like you are cheating! But it is an essential element to being an ACTIVE reader.

Reading is a skill that is used in all subject areas and can greatly increase or decrease a student’s success in the classroom. Some reading strategies are summarized below:

Activating prior knowledge

Activating prior knowledge is a reading strategy that occurs before the student is introduced to reading material. The teacher uses a prereading activity, which can be done in the form of a journal or class discussion. This enables the reader to make connections between something they already have knowledge of and the new knowledge from the text.

Clarifying

Clarifying is making the meaning of the text clear to the reader. This reading strategy is used throughout reading. Students can be taught to ask questions, reread, restate, and visualize making the text more comprehendible.

Context Clues

Context clues is using words surrounding an unknown word to determine its meaning. This reading strategy can be taught in conjunction with vocabulary. Students should be encouraged to use context clues for an unfamiliar word while reading before immediately reaching for the dictionary.

Drawing Conclusions

Drawing conclusions is a reading strategy that is done after reading. To draw conclusions means the student uses written or visual clues to figure out something that is not directly stated in the reading. Teachers can facilitate this reading strategy by creating leading questions that relate to a reading. Students then respond with their own opinions, thoughts, or ideas that is based on information from their reading material.

Evaluating

Evaluating is a reading strategy that is conducted during and after reading. This involves encouraging the reader to form opinions, make judgments, and develop ideas from reading. Teachers can create evaluative questions that will lead the student to make generalizations about and critically evaluate a text.

Inferring

Inferring is giving a logical guess based on facts or evidence presented using prior knowledge to help the reader understand the deeper meaning of a text. This reading strategy is conducted during reading. An activity to practice inferring with students is to take a sentence from a text. Then, have students state the explicit meaning of the sentence as well as the inferential meaning.

Predicting

Predicting is using the text to guess what will happen next. Then the reader confirms or rejects their prediction as they read. Predicting is a reading strategy that done before and during reading. A technique to apply to this reading strategy is to use the Think, Pair, Share method. Have the students form predictions, share with a partner, and then participate in class discussion.

Rereading

Rereading is a reading strategy that gives the reader another chance to make sense out of a challenging text. For practice, have students reread a passage to check for understanding and model when rereading can be helpful.

Restating

Restating is a reading strategy where the reader will retell, shorten, or summarize the meaning of a passage or chapter, either orally or in written form. This reading strategy can be performed during reading.

Setting a Purpose

This reading strategy is started before reading. Setting a purpose provides focus for the reader. You can introduce this reading strategy by having students read directions for a reading task and list the requirements. Students then need to determine why they are being asked to read. Eventually, you can start to encourage students to set their purpose when reading independently.

Skimming and Scanning

Skimming and scanning are reading strategies that can assist a reader in getting specific information from the text. Students should be taught appropriate times to skim or scan, such as looking for a specific answer, and inappropriate times to use scanning or skimming, such as when reading to comprehend. Skimming is a reading technique that is used to get a quick “gist” of a section or chapter. Scanning is a reading technique that is reading quickly to locate specific information. You can first introduce skimming and scanning by brainstorming a list of textual clues that will help students, such as bold-face type, capital letters, dates, key words, etc. Practice skimming and scanning can be practiced with short passages to gain mastery.

Visualizing

Visualizing is a reading strategy that encourages students to use mental images that emerge from reading the text. This is done during reading to aid in understanding. This reading strategy can be introduced by reading aloud a descriptive passage while students close their eyes and imagine how it looks. Students then draw or write what they see and justify how the text supports their image.

This is in no way an exhaustive list of all reading strategies. It is up to you to choose appropriate techniques for your reading activity. Varying these reading strategies will increase the student’s comprehension, retention, and command over the subject matter.

In short, we can say that strategies that can help students read more quickly and effectively include:

• Previewing: reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions to get a sense of the structure and content of a reading selection
• Predicting: using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension; using knowledge of the text type and purpose to make predictions about discourse structure; using knowledge about the author to make predictions about writing style, vocabulary, and content
• Skimming and scanning: using a quick survey of the text to get the main idea, identify text structure, confirm or question predictions
• Guessing from context: using prior knowledge of the subject and the ideas in the text as clues to the meanings of unknown words, instead of stopping to look them up
• Paraphrasing: stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension by restating the information and ideas in the text

Sources:

http://englishforuniversity.com/?page_id=1275

http://www.online-distance-learning-education.com/article_info.php?articles_id=53

http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/stratread.htm