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12.3.1.3, How do we read?

Grellet (1981:4), suggests the main ways of reading to be the following, (the lists of exemplary tasks for the four main ways of reading are taken from Cross, 1991:260-263):

12.3.1.3.1.    skimming - ąuickły running one’s eyes over a text to get the gist of it - generał sense;

—    comparing values,

—    finding and comparing events,

—    selecting a title,

—    drawing inferences,

|fe deciding the ąuestion,

—    creating a title,

12.3.1.3.2.    scanning - ąuickły going through the text to find a particular piece of information:

—    finding new words for old,

-— locating grammar features,

—    finding a specific advertisement,

—    comparing details,

—    checking dates,

—    making shopping lists,

-r- making word sets,

—    choosing newspaper headlines,

12.3.1.3.3.    extensive reading - reading longer texts, usually for one’s own pleasure; this is a fluency activity, mainly involving global understanding:

—    keeping records,

—    completing wali charts,

—    making summaries,

—    indicating the difficulty of a given source,

12.3.1.3.4.    intensive reading - reading shorter texts, to extract specific information; this is morę an accuracy activity involving reading for detail:

—    matching nouns and verbs,

—    splitting sentences,

—    combining sentences,

—    making summaries (sentence for each paragraph),

—    reordering sentences,

—    filling the gaps,

—    completing tables and graphs,

—    taking sides (listing arguments),

—    reading and choosing,

—    selecting a summary, comparing versions,

-srfi identifying facts,

—    focusing on form and style.

12.3.2. Reading skills

A good reading class is the one where the students are trained to use appropriate skills to read authentic texts. It is the teacher’s responsibility to decide in advance what skills the students need to practise, depending on their level and their needs so that the teacher could devise tasks which will reąuire students to use appropriate skills and guide their understanding of the text.

Reading involves a variety of skills. The main ones that readers resort to are presented below (Grellet, 1981:4-5):

—    recognising the script of a language,

—deducing the meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items, understanding explicitly stated information,

A- understanding information when not explicitly stated,

—    understanding conceptual meaning,

Hf- understanding the communicative value (fimction) of sentences and utterances,

■H understanding relations within the sentence,

—    understanding relations between the parts of a text through lexical

cohesion devices,

—    understanding cohesion between the parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices,

—    interpreting text by going outside it,

—    recognising indicators in discourse,

identifying the main point or important information in a piece of discourse,