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Reading Skills: Scanning, Intensive Reading and Extensive Reading

The document discusses reading skills and subskills. It identifies three main reading skills: accuracy, comprehension, and fluency. It then describes four reading subskills: scanning, skimming, extensive reading, and intensive reading. The document also discusses the difference between the terms "skill" and "skills" as they relate to reading, noting that a skill integrates cognitive, attitudinal, and manipulative processes through practice, while "skills" is a vague term that does not capture this integration. It concludes that reading is best understood as a complex skill that can be learned through various methods of instruction.

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Myeshaena Ashryver Galathynius
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145 views

Reading Skills: Scanning, Intensive Reading and Extensive Reading

The document discusses reading skills and subskills. It identifies three main reading skills: accuracy, comprehension, and fluency. It then describes four reading subskills: scanning, skimming, extensive reading, and intensive reading. The document also discusses the difference between the terms "skill" and "skills" as they relate to reading, noting that a skill integrates cognitive, attitudinal, and manipulative processes through practice, while "skills" is a vague term that does not capture this integration. It concludes that reading is best understood as a complex skill that can be learned through various methods of instruction.

Uploaded by

Myeshaena Ashryver Galathynius
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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READING SKILLS

 Accuracy: Accuracy measures a students’ ability to correctly decode


alphabet letters into words and sentences.
 Comprehension: Comprehension refers to a student’s understanding of a
text. As a child reads, can they identify the most important detail in a story
or article? This skill will help student learn to write effectively, creating
structured paragraphs with a main idea and supporting details.
 Fluency: Fluency measures how proficiently the students read aloud.
Readers who have difficulty with pace read too quickly or slowly for an
audience to enjoy. Readers without expression tend to sound flat or
disinterested.

READING SUBSKILLS

Krashen & Terrell (1998) identify the four main sub-skills of reading as skimming,
scanning, intensive reading and extensive reading.

 Scanning: Spratt, et al. (2011) state that scanning refers to searching for


specific information within a text, where a quick glance is taken to find the
relevant information without reading the whole text.
 Skimming: Krashen & Terrell (1998) defines skimming as taking a quick
glance to extract superficial information of a text without major details, but
instead of trying to find specific words or information if focuses on the
general essence of the different parts or sections of a text.
 Extensive Reading: Yamashita (2015) identifies extensive reading as a sub-
skill where great quantities of easy and interesting reading materials are
consumed, allowing the reader to enjoy reading and to read quickly which
leads to the high volumes of consumption. This pleasure reading is mostly
done out of the enjoyment of discovering and learning from the text.
 Intensive Reading: Spratt, et al. (2011) describe intensive reading as the
opposite of extensive reading. General comprehension is not the focus,
instead examining and studying the language takes center stage, which is
also called reading for detail.
READING AS SKILL VS READING AS SKILLS

What is “skill”?

What do psychologists refer to as a “skill”? One comprehensive and eclectic


definition by McDonald (1965) is that a "skill" is the total performance of the
integration of complex processes - cognitive, attitudinal and manipulative.

He writes that “From a psychological point of view, playing football or chess or


using a typewriter or the English language correctly demands complex sets of
responses – some of them cognitive, some attitudinal, and some manipulative.” But
McDonald also emphasizes that a person (i.e. a baseball player) “must also
understand” the game, must like playing it, and have appropriate attitudes (about
winning and sporting attitudes). This complex integration of processes is what is
usually referred to as a “skill.”

What is “skills”?

Educational books and articles on reading instruction in the 1970s and 1980s
provide a vague and ambiguous meaning of “skills.”

A typical example of the word “skills” is the following:

“A critical part of any reading or language arts program is the teaching of the skills
underlying the reading process. Without the basic skills of word discrimination,
vocabulary development, and comprehension, it is virtually impossible for a
student to read a new material with success” (Gross et al., 1974).

“Given a sentence with a heteronym, the student will identify correctly, from the
context, the syllable that is accented.”

The word “skills” in the writings of such authors means little more than “whatsits”
or “thingamies.”
Conclusion

The key feature of every skill is the integration of the complex set of behaviors that
make the total pattern. Integration is learned through practice. Practice in
integration is only supplied by performing the whole skill. One learns to fish by
fishing, one learns to play chess by playing chess and one learns to read by
reading.

This explains Bamberger’s (1976) paradox that, “Many children do not read books
because they cannot read well enough. They cannot read well enough because they
do not read books.” It also explains why, in general, seem to learn to read by almost
any method.

Singer (1966) states, “Children have learned to read by means of a wide variety of
methods and materials… However, all the necessary elements for reading are
present in the materials employed by each method. Pupils learning to read through
any of these methods could have used their capabilities for selecting their own unit
of perception, their own conceptualized mediational response systems, and
developed their own mental organization for attaining speed and power of reading.”

In other words, reading is a skill. No matter what framework of teaching methods


and materials we set reading in, its essential psychological features assert
themselves. The brain processes that determine the course of skill development
operate constantly in learners despite the variety of methods and materials used in
reading instruction.

It is, however, important to note that teachers, their methods and their materials
do make a difference in children’s success and failure in learning to read.

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