General skills/strategies
‘Strategies represent conscious decisions taken by the reader, skills are deployed unconsciously’ (Urquhart & Weir 1988: 97).
Scanning
Look quickly through a text to locate specific symbol o group of symbols (word, phrase, name, figure, date). Focus on local comprehension; most text will be ignored. Rapid rate of reading; no sequencing necessary.
Operations à looking for/matching:
· Specific words/phrase
· Figures/percentages
· Dates of particular events
· Specific items in an index/inventory
Skimming
Skimming à reading for gist. What is this text about? Selective reading, building of macrostructure; little detail.
Purposes:
· Establishing general sense of the text
· Quickly establishing macro propositional structure as an outline summary
· Establishing relevance of text to needs
Operations:
· Identifying source
· Reading titles & subtitles
· Reading abstract carefully
· Reading introductory and concluding paragraphs carefully
· Reading 1st & last sentence of each paragraph carefully
· Identifying discourse markers
· Noting repeated key content words
· Identifying markers of importance
· Skipping clusters of detail
· Glancing any non-verbal info