The Nature of Reading Skills

Until just recently the lots of and varied reading abilities and strategies for use in every day circumstances have been largely subordinate to a narrower variety of abilities required for handling streamlined readers (especially at the primary and intermediate levels). Furthermore, on a few language courses, effective reading abilities have actually been pushed into the background in an attempt to establish oral fluency abilities. Attempts at dealing with the lots of complicated reading skills often come too late, at the tertiary level (i.

e. at university, technical college), when pupils/students suddenly find themselves faced with professional and technical literature in the foreign language. There exist couple of comprehensive methodical programs which have been built from an in-depth analysis of the abilities required for effective reading. Much test product is still limited to brief reading extracts on which basic comprehension questions are based.

Checking out comprehension test product is really carefully associated to the kind of practice material utilized by the teacher to establish the reading skills.

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Few language instructors would refute the value of reading: what is still urgently needed in lots of class tests is higher awareness of the real procedures included in reading and the production of appropriate workout and test products to help in the mastery of these processes. Before reading tests in the foreign language can be successfully constructed, the fist language reading abilities of the students should be determined. Clearly there is often little purpose in testing in the foreign language those basic reading skills which the students have actually not yet established in their own language.

Nevertheless, the simple truth that a pupil has mastered some of the necessary reading skills in the mother tongue is no guarantee at all that she or he will be able to move those skills to reading another language. Reading itself suggests reading and understanding. A foreign language learner who says that she or he can check out the words but does not understand what they mean, does not check out in this sense. She or he is merely decoding-- equating written symbols into corresponding noises.

Reading is an exercise dominated by the eyes and the brain. Different aspects of nature of reading can be illustrated and clarified. Some assumptions about those are the following: 1. We need to perceive and decode letters in order to read words. 2. We need to understand all the words in order to understand the meaning of a text. 3. The more symbols (letters or words) there are in a text, the longer it will take to read it. 4. We gather meaning from what we read.