The Method of Improving

Reading Ability and Efficiency

(黄冈师范学院外国语学院  黄爱华 Edward Godson Hemingway)  

Reading is an active, problem solving process, which requires a reader to extract the useful information from a certain text as efficiently as possible. In regards to different reading materials, the reader needs to apply different strategies. For example, when looking at a notice board to see if there is an advertisement for a particular job information, a reader will quickly reject the irrelevant information and find what he is looking for; while reading an essay of special interest in a scientific journal, a reader demands more than a gist of the text, and he might be more eager to collect the detailed statements, descriptions, analysis, illustrations, etc. There is no exaggeration to say reading is a skillful job with profundity, patience and confidence in learning.

Generally speaking, there are four main ways in reading:

① Skimming. It means to run one’s eyes quickly over a text aiming at getting the gist of it;

② Scanning. It means to go through a text quickly to find a particular piece of information;

③ Extensive reading. It is usually applied to longer texts, especially for one’s own pleasure. This is a fluency activity, mainly involving global understanding;

④ Intensive reading. It is always adopted in reading shorter texts, to extract specific information. This is more an accuracy activity involving reading for detail.

As a matter of fact, these different ways of reading are mutually inclusive. For instance, one often skims through a passage to see what it is about before a further reading. In the further reading, he might choose to read extensively, or else. In real practice, the reading purposes constantly vary and therefore, as a teacher in devising exercises, he should vary the questions and activities according to the type of text studied and the purpose in reading it. As a student in doing a comprehensive work, he should choose his reading strategies accordingly as well.

While reading, there are three main techniques to observe:

1.      Sensitizing  In face of unfamiliar words and complex or apparently obscure sentences, the reader needs to be ensured that by no means he should stumble on every difficulty or get discouraged from the out-set.

First, he could make an inference. He could make it by means of making the use of syntactic, logical and cultural clues to discover the meaning of the unknown elements. Here, word-formation and derivation will play an important role. When dealing with a new piece of reading material, the reader should be encouraged to make a guess at the meaning of the words he doesn’t know rather than look them up in a dictionary. If he must, he should only do so after having tried to work out a solution on his own.

Next, the reader should try to make sure of the relations within the sentence. Failing in getting an immediate grasp of sentence structures will be a definite handicap in the case of texts with relations, embedded clauses and complex structure. So it is important to cultivate an ability of looking for the “core” of the sentence. In order to obtain this ability, the reader may get himself to divide passage into sense groups and mark the important elements of each sentence in a passage with such particular signs as dots, underlines, wave lines, boxes, etc.

Last, the reader is required to link sentences and ideas that are announced, introduced and taken up again later throughout the passage with the help of references, which cover all devices that permit lexical relationship within a text, such as anaphora (reference to an element previously mentioned) and cataphora (reference to be mentioned below.) If a reader does not understand inter-or intra-sentential connectors, he might fail to recognize the communicative value of the passage since those words act as signals (As far as the signal words are concerned, the reader may get extra information from A English Course for Comprehension and Speed, Book II (p21, p46, p70) published by Higher Education Press.) indicating the function of what follows. Therefore, it is very essential for a reader to recognize the various devices used to create textual cohesion and more particularly the use of reference and link-words.

2.   Improving reading speed 

An efficient way to increasing reading speed is to time while making a reading. A conversion table, taking the length of the text and the reading time into account, will keep a reader informed of what his reading speed is and this pressure of time will contribute to his attempts to promote his reading speed.

Reading should also be followed by comprehension questions or activities since reading speed should not be developed at the expense of comprehension.

3.       From skimming to scanning

There is one thing to be pointed here when doing a reading comprehension that there are several types of reading according to one’s reasons for reading. The reader will never read efficiently unless he can adapted his reading speed and techniques to his aim. Therefore, some methods are necessary to be followed:

First, predicting. It is a basic skill to all the reading techniques. It is the faculty of guessing what is to come next. The reader should try to make use of grammatical, logical and cultural clues.

Second, previewing. It is a very specific reading technique which involving using the table of the contents, the appendix, the preface, the headings, etc, to find out where the required information is likely to be.

Last, anticipation. Motivation or desire is of great importance in reading. While reading, the reader is doomed to expect to find answers to a number of questions and specific information or ideas he is interested in. This “expectation” is inherent in the process of reading which is a permanent interrelationship between the reader and the text.

To sum up here, both skimming and scanning are specific reading techniques necessary for speed and efficient reading. Skimming is a more through activity that requires an overall view of the text and implies a definite reading competence. Scanning, on the contrary, is far more limited, and it retrieves what information is relevant to the purpose. Yet it is usual to make use of these two activities together when reading a given text.

In reading, the reader needs to obtain the information of the given text from the following two aspects:

1.      to make sure of the organization of the passage, that is, to have a good understanding of the passage from a macro-structural point of view. It includes the function, general orgnization, rhetorical organization, the cohesive devices and intra-sentential relations, etc; and

2.      to have a clear idea of the contents. This is from the micro-structural point of view. In the text, there are certain facts, and some are plain and some implied. As regard to this, the reader may get a direct reference, or make an inference accordingly. Also, after finishing reading a passage, the reader needs to think about what the writer implied or suggested. This is a problem never to be ignored.

In order to make it clear, a flowing diagram of reading process will be served below: 

Reading ability is not an inherent skill possessed by men, nor a craft mastered over night, but a result of a long-term’s accumulation of the practice of reading. Read as much as you can, then your ability will be definitely improved at length, and as a reward, your spiritual world will be enriched. That is why Francis Bacon says “ Reading maketh a full man!”     

                                                   --- La Fin---

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