Faculty of Education
Honour’s Degree in English Language Teaching
Course material for 1st Year - 2024 Lecturer: Contact:
Study Skills II Week 01 (22nd – 26th July) José Pires
[email protected] Lesson 1
Unit I: Reading Skills
Topic: Skimming versus Scanning
Reading is an exercise dominated by the eyes and the brain. The eyes receive messages and the
brain then has to work out the significance of these messages.
Like in listening, because the reading text is static, students are often tempted to read slowly,
worrying about the meaning of each particular word. And yet, if they do this, they will never
achieve the ability to read texts in English in anything but a slow and ponderous way.
The teacher should insist in skimming or scanning skills being performed rapidly and insists on
the comprehension task being performed in a limited amount of time: if this is regularly done the
teacher the teacher will find the amount of limited time necessary becoming less and less.
Skimming and Scanning
Skimming and scanning are reading techniques that use rapid eye movement and
keywords to move quickly through text for slightly different purposes. Skimming is reading
rapidly in order to get a general overview of the material. Scanning is reading rapidly in order to
find facts. While skimming tells you what general information is within a section, scanning helps
you locate a particular fact.
We use skimming in previewing (reading before you read), reviewing (reading after you
read), determining the main idea from a long selection you don't wish to read, or when
trying to find source material for a research paper.
On the other hand, we use scanning in research to find particular facts, to study fact-heavy
topics, and to answer questions requiring factual support.
To get a general idea of what it is all about, we can conduct a survey of book or chapter.
We are now going to look at the technique of scanning. When we are scanning a text we
are looking for specific information, which we know, or suspect, it is there.
Both surveying and scanning are forms of skimming, by which we mean that you don’t
read every word.
1. Normal Reading
Reading 2. Skimming 2.1 Survey (to get overall impression)
2.2 Scanning (for particular information)
When you are scanning a book for specific information, you will sometimes get help
from the index or the list of contents, which are there for that very purpose.
1
Skimming to save time
Skimming can save you hours of laborious reading. However, it is not always the most
appropriate way to read. It is very useful as a preview to a more detailed reading or when
reviewing a selection heavy in content. But when you skim, you may miss important
points or overlook the finer shadings of meaning, for which rapid reading or perhaps even
study reading may be necessary.
Use skimming to overview your textbook chapters or to review for a test. Use skimming
to decide if you need to read something at all, for example during the preliminary research
for a paper. Skimming can tell you enough about the general idea and tone of the material,
as well as its gross similarity or difference from other sources, to know if you need to
read it at all.
To skim, prepare yourself to move rapidly through the pages. You will not read every
word; you will pay special attention to typographical cues-headings, boldface and italic
type, indenting, bulleted and numbered lists. You will be alert for key words and phrases,
the names of people and places, dates, nouns, and unfamiliar words. In general follow
these steps:
1. Read the table of contents or chapter overview to learn the main divisions of
ideas.
2. Glance through the main headings in each chapter just to see a word or two. Read
the headings of charts and tables.
3. Read the entire introductory paragraph and then the first and last sentence only
of each following paragraph. For each paragraph, read only the first few words of
each sentence or to locate the main idea.
4. Stop and quickly read the sentences containing keywords indicated in boldface or
italics.
5. When you think you have found something significant, stop to read the entire
sentence to make sure. Then go on the same way. Resist the temptation to stop to
read details you don't need.
6. Read chapter summaries when provided.
If you cannot complete all the steps above, compromise: read only the chapter overviews
and summaries, for example, or the summaries and all the boldfaced keywords. When
you skim, you take a calculated risk that you may miss something. For instance, the main
ideas of paragraphs are not always found in the first or last sentences (although in many
textbooks they are). Ideas you miss you may pick up in a chapter overview or summary.
Good skimmers do not skim everything at the same rate or give equal attention to
everything. While skimming is always faster than your normal reading speed, you should
slow down in the following situations:
When you skim introductory and concluding paragraphs
When you skim topic sentences
When you find an unfamiliar word
When the material is very complicated
Scanning for research and study
Scanning, too, uses keywords and organizational cues. But while the goal of skimming
is a bird's-eye view of the material, the goal of scanning is to locate and swoop down on
particular facts.
2
Facts may be buried within long text passages that have relatively little else to do with
your topic or claim. Skim this material first to decide if it is likely to contain the facts you
need. Don't forget to scan tables of contents, summaries, indexes, headings, and
typographical cues. To make sense of lists and tables, skim them first to understand how
they are organized: alphabetical, chronological, or most-to-least, for example. If after
skimming you decide the material will be useful, go ahead and scan:
1. Know what you're looking for. Decide on a few key words or phrases–search
terms, if you will. You will be a flesh-and-blood search engine.
2. Look for only one keyword at a time. If you use multiple keywords, do multiple
scans.
3. Let your eyes float rapidly down the page until you find the word or phrase you
want.
4. When your eye catches one of your keywords, read the surrounding material
carefully.
Scanning to answer questions
If you are scanning for facts to answer a specific question, one step is already done for
you: the question itself supplies the keywords. Follow these steps:
1. Read each question completely before starting to scan. Choose your keywords
from the question itself.
2. Look for answers to only one question at a time. Scan separately for each question.
3. When you locate a keyword, read the surrounding text carefully to see if it is
relevant.
4. Re-read the question to determine if the answer you found answers this question.
Scanning is a technique that requires concentration and can be surprisingly tiring. You
may have to practice at not allowing your attention to wander. Choose a time and place
that you know works for you and dive in.
Multiple reading skills (including organization analysis):
There is one technique which helps us all the time that we are reading, but especially
when scanning. It is an awareness of the organization of the text. If you look back at the
exercise from the passage entitled “Malaria – a new threat”, you will see that it has
roughly the kind of organization shown in the diagram that you will see later in this
discussion.
There are hundreds of different types of organization in texts. For example, in a scientific
text one often finds this type of organization:
Problem
↓
Hypothesis
↓
Experiment
↓
Conclusions
3
Malaria – a new threat
Problem → How to prevent malaria
Solutions →Draining of breeding places
↓
Biological engineering
↓
Wire, screens, netting, etc
↓
Quinine
↓
More modern drugs
↓
DDT
↓
Further problems → Resistance to new drugs and DDT
↓
Summary
Diagram: Analysis of text organization
The simplest type of organization is chronological (i.e. things stated one after another in
the order that they happened).
If you know the organization of a text, you have a better idea of where to find the
information you need.
Another advantage of being aware of text organization is that it makes it much easier to
write a summary. Being able to summarize, i.e, extract the relevant main ideas from a
book, discussion, lecture, etc, is probably one of the most valuable skills you can have as
a student. What goes into your summary will often depend on your purpose in reading
the text: what is relevant to one student may not be relevant to another. The length of your
summary will depend on how much detail you want to go into, but obviously summaries
should be kept as brief as possible.
In the upcoming exercises, you will be asked to make written summaries as well as
diagrams of text organization – but remember that a diagram may often be the best kind
of summary, and easier to memeorise, too.
References:
Harmer, J (1991), The Practice of English Language Teaching, Longman
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