Reading Skills in English Language

Everybody knows that reading ts very important skill. Sometimes  we want to find specific  information  and general idea of what we are reading. It is a constant process of guessing. It is a part and parcel for learning English. So it  is very important for us. There are three types of reading skills in English Language. They are - a. Skimming  b. Scanning    and  c. Inference .
Skimming is one of the reading strategies. It is a useful reading skill. This skill requires to jump through the text ignoring parts of it. We may be looking quickly over the text to get a general specific idea of the content. This is called skimming . For example,  we can think about newspaper articles.  We read it quickly and  after that we forget it, we only remember the  idea of it or  the subject matter of the content. In other words skimming means looking through a piece of English to get the general idea or gist . We often read an article quickly , perhaps to see if  we  want  to read it  in detail or not , or just  to see  what  it is  about.

Scanning is  another skill which is different  from skimming. When we read a paragraph we may be interested in information than reading.We are going to find some information from the paragraph. Actually the specification of having  information is known as scanning.

Interference  means  making  use  of  syntactic , logical and cultural clues to discover  the  meaning  of  unknown elements. If  these are words then word-information and derivation will also play  and important  part .When  dealing  a new  text, it is  better not to explain  the difficult words  to the learners beforehand.They would only get used to being given pre-processed texts and  would  never make  the  effort  to cope  with  a difficult passage on their own. On the contrary the student should be encouraged to make a guess at the meaning of the words they  do not  know rather than look them up  in a dictionary. If  they  need  to look  at the  dictionary to get a precise meaning which is an important and necessary  activity  too. They  should only do  so  after  having  tried  to work  out  a  solution  on their own.This is why from the very beginning  it is vital  to  develop  the skills of inference. The exercises suggested try to develop inference different ways. On the other hand it indicates grammatical analysis.