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Success Strategies
First Edition, Volume I: August 2006
Part I - Study Skills and Strategies
Strategies for Developing Reading Skills
Using Reading Strategies
Students are often frustrated by the fact that they cannot automatically transfer the strategies they use when reading in their native language to reading in a language they are learning. Instead, they seem to think reading means starting at the beginning and going word by word, stopping to look up every unknown vocabulary item, until they reach the end. When they do this, students are relying exclusively on their linguistic knowledge, a bottom-up strategy. One of the most important functions that will help students move past this idea and to use top-down strategies as they do in their native language.
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.