Improve your English reading skills – Part 1: Styles of reading

readingBefore you can start to improve your English reading skills, you need to decide on which which styles of reading you will use most and where your strengths and weaknesses are.

Let’s have a look at the four main styles of reading and work out which aspects you need to work on in order to improve your English reading skills overall.

1. Skimming – This is when you read quickly, just trying to get an impression of the overall meaning of a text.
Examples: reading a newspaper or magazine, looking at an advert.

2. Scanning – When you ‘scan’, you are looking for a specific piece of information within the text.
Examples: looking at a timetable to find out when your train leaves, looking for a number in a phone book.

3. Reading for detail – This is when you pay attention to every single word and spend time thinking about what each individual sentence means.
Examples: reading a grammar explanation, reading the instructions for an exercise in a textbook.

4. Reading for a deeper meaning – This is when you read quickly through a long text and think about the overall meaning. You might consider that there is some hidden deeper meaning. Maybe it relates to another topic or maybe it is making some kind of political statement.
Example: reading a novel.

Try some of the examples I have mentioned here and find out which areas you feel most comfortable with and which you need to work on.

Why are you learning English and which of these skills do you think you will need to use most?

Once you have decided which of these types of English reading skills you need to work on, you will be able to focus on it and really start making some major improvements.

Over the next four weeks, I’ll be going into each of these skills in more detail so remember to check back to see all the latest updates.

This is part of my ‘Tuesday Tips‘ series. Every Tuesday, I share a simple tip on how to improve your language skills. Some of these are techniques I use with students in class and others are things I’ve found work well when learning languages myself. If you decide to try them out, let me know how they went by leaving a comment below the article. Click here to see some more tips on how to improve your English.

Today’s image is by Zsuzsanna Kilian.