Thursday 31 October 2013

Reading Benfits and Strategies


Benefits and Main strategies of Reading

Reading is an essential element at every stage of one’s life particularly in academic and professional contexts. Undoubtedly reading is a means of discovering information to expand one’s knowledge and understanding of the subject of any kind. It is said that ‘reading is to mind what exercise is to the body’. People used to spend some considerable amount of time for reading in the past since there were no televisions and computers but now it is no exaggeration to mention one thing that majority of the people have lost interest and passion to reading and spending their time for talking on mobile phones,  sending SMS, online chatting, social networking etc. Francis Bacon rightly observed that ‘Reading makes a man complete’. There is a saying that only good readers are good communicators and therefore, reading skills should not be ignored by anyone especially the student community.

Benefits of Reading: Given below are some of the most important benefits of reading:

  • Reading regularly increases the vocabulary.
  • Reading can develop positive values and also helps in building confidence in our lives.
  • Reading helps us keep our mind focussed on a book or material that we study and it also increases our ability to concentrate more. 
  • Reading gives us pleasure and relaxation.
  •  In addition to these, reading develops our creativity and critical thinking.

3 main strategies of reading: 

Skimming, Scanning and Intensive Reading are the three main reading strategies--

  • Skimming: Skimming means gathering as much information as possible from a text in the shortest possible time. We use skimming to quickly gather the most important information or ‘gist’ from the document without having to read it all in detail. For example while reading the newspaper we may not read the entire information but notice only the headlines.
  • Scanning: Scanning is a technique for fast reading. It is a way of reading to look for specific information in a text as quickly as possible. We apply this particular strategy when we look up a phone number in the telephone directory, searching the examination result of a student in the newspapers. 
  • Intensive Reading: Intensive Reading is used in order to extract detailed information. By using this strategy we understand each word, information or fact clearly. Student read intensively their academic materials and text books by paying proper attention.