Types of reading skills

Find key facts

Identify facts and opinion
Develop reading fluency
Identify the main idea in a paragraph
Infer information from a text
Activate prior knowledge
Understand sequence
Read for detail
Work out meaning from the context
Read for gist
Use photos to help understanding
Use pictures to predict a story
Use a dictionary to find meaning and
spelling
Use labels in a text to aid comprehension
Compare and contrast information
Identify and infer information
Interpret preferences
Identify specific information
Understand facts and details
Infer meaning and draw conclusions
Scan for specific information
Infer meaning from a text
Recognize different points of view
Find supporting information
Summarise a text
Recognize the writer’s opinion
What are the key comprehension strategies to teach?
Studies on good readers have identified a number of comprehension
strategies to be highly useful. These strategies range from the simple to the
complex. From the array of strategies examined by researchers, the
following strategies have been shown to be especially helpful and to lend
themselves particularly well to instruction:1

Activating and Using Background Knowledge

This strategy requires readers to activate their background knowledge and to
use that knowledge to help them understand what they are reading.
Background knowledge is made up of a person's experiences with the world
(including what he or she has read), along with his or her concepts for how
written text works, including word identification, print concepts, word
meaning, and how text is organized. Research has established that readers'
existing knowledge is critical in determining their ability to comprehend what
they read.2

One of the most important contributions made by cognitive scientists to the

understanding of how comprehension works is schema theory.[3] This
theory is based on how people organize and activate their knowledge.

According to schema theory, as people learn about the world, they develop a
large network of knowledge structures, or schemas, with each schema
connected to many others. These schemas grow and change as a person
acquires new information through experience and reading. For example, a
very young child's schema for dog might contain only her or his
understanding of the family pet — something white, furry, and fun to play
with. As the child gains more experiences with a variety of dogs in a variety
of settings, the dog schema will expand and be refined. It may connect to
other schema — types of dogs; colors of dogs; foods dogs eat; places where
dogs stay when the family is on vacation; dangerous dogs; who
veterinarians are; and locations of important dog shows.

When they applied schema theory to reading comprehension, cognitive

scientists found that good readers constantly connect their background
knowledge to the new knowledge they encounter in a text. In fact, they
appear to activate a schema as soon as they begin to read. The initial
schema then activates others, thus directly affecting how readers
understand and react to a text.4
Schemas that are related to text organization are especially important to
comprehension. Having knowledge of a text's organization improves
students' understanding of that text.5

Generating and Asking Questions

This strategy involves readers asking themselves questions throughout the
reading of a text. The ability of readers to ask themselves relevant questions
as they read is especially valuable in helping them to integrate information,
identify main ideas, and summarize information. Asking the right questions
allows good readers to focus on the most important information in a text. 6

Generating good questions may also lead readers to focus on problems with
comprehension and to take actions to deal with these problems. 7

Making Inferences
This strategy requires readers to evaluate or draw conclusions from
information in a text. Authors do not always provide complete descriptions
of, or explicit information about a topic, setting, character, or event.
However, they often provide clues that readers can use to "read between the
lines"-by making inferences that combine information in the text with their
background knowledge.

It has been shown that when readers are taught how to make inferences,
they improve their abilities to construct meaning. Indeed, research indicates
that the ability to make inferences is crucial to successful reading. 8

Predicting
This strategy involves the ability of readers to get meaning from a text by
making informed predictions. Good readers use predicting as a way to
connect their existing knowledge to new information from a text to get
meaning from what they read.9 Before reading, they may use what they
know about an author to predict what a text will be about. The title of a text
may trigger memories of texts with similar content, allowing them to predict
the content of the new text.

During reading, good readers may make predictions about what is going to
happen next, or what ideas or evidence the author will present to support an
argument. They tend to evaluate these predictions continuously, and revise
any prediction that is not confirmed by the reading.

Summarizing
This strategy involves the ability of readers to pull together or synthesize
information in a text so as to explain in their own words what the text is
about. Summarizing is an important strategy because it can enable readers
to recall text quickly. It also can make readers more aware of text
organization, of what is important in a text and of how ideas are related. 10

Effective summarizing of expository text may involve such things as

condensing the steps in a scientific process, the stages of development of an
art movement, or the episodes that led to some major historical event.

Effective summarizing of narrative text can involve such things as

connecting and synthesizing events in a story line or identifying the factors
that motivate a character's actions and behavior.

Visualizing
This involves the ability of readers to make mental images of a text as a way
to understand processes or events they encounter during reading. This
ability can be an indication that a reader understands a text. Some research
suggests that readers who visualize as they read are better able to recall
what they have read than are those who do not visualize.11

Visualizing is especially valuable when it is applied to narrative texts. In

reading narratives, readers often can develop a clear understanding of what
is happening by visualizing the setting, characters, or actions in the plot.
However, visualizing can also be applied to the reading of expository texts,
with readers visualizing steps in a process or stages in an event or creating
an image to help them remember some abstract concept or important
name.12

Comprehension Monitoring
This involves the ability of readers to know when they understand what they
read, when they do not understand, and to use appropriate strategies to
improve their understanding when it is blocked.13 Comprehension monitoring
is a form of metacognition. Good readers are aware of and monitor their
thought processes as they read. In contrast, poor readers "just do it." 14

The strategies employed by good readers to improve understanding are

called "repair" or "fix-up" strategies. Specific repair strategies include
rereading, reading ahead, clarifying words by looking them up in a dictionary
or glossary, or asking someone for help.15

In general, good readers use a variety of strategies such as the ones just
discussed to construct meaning as they read. However, not all good readers
use the same strategies; good readers tend to develop and practice those
strategies that are most useful to them. Further, good readers are flexible in
their strategy use: they switch from strategy to strategy as they read; they
use different strategies with different kinds of texts.
The point is, because good readers have conscious control of their strategy
use, they are able to make decisions about which strategies to use and when
to use them. Most good readers do this with little or no explicit strategy
instruction. Most students, however, can benefit greatly from organized,
explicit instruction that teaches them to use specific strategies for
understanding text. The good news is that specific comprehension strategies
can be taught and learned - and that their deliberate use by readers
improves comprehension.16

Skimming
Skimming means to read a page or handout - skip read - by reading the headings and
first sentences of each paragraph or section. It usually takes three forms: Preview,
Overview and Review. See skimming for more.

Scanning
Scanning differs from skimming in that you do not deal with all of the content, but search
through the material for a specific purpose or a specific word (or its synonym):

 finding the answer to a question

 seeking an appropriate quotation reference or statement
 locating names in a directory, words in a dictionary, prices in a catalogue, etc.

When you scan, you cover only as much of the content as is necessary to accomplish
your purpose. See scanning for more.

In-depth reading
In-depth (or detail) reading is the most involved and essential. The purpose of this style
is to understand the concepts and arguments that the text contains. It should be done
after skimming the text. See in-depth reading for more.