Strategies for Improving Reading Skills

“Communication Skills”
ENG-134
Lecture 13
“Strategies for Improving Reading Skills”
By: Tariq Amin
Lecturer, Dept of English,
KUST

Outline
• Reading
• Strategies for improving reading skills
• Predicting
• Visualizing
• Making Connections
• Summarizing
• Questioning
• Inferring
Course: Functional English ENG-134 - Instructor: Tariq Amin, Lecturer, Dept of English, KUST - Email: tariqamin@kust.edu.pk
Topic: Strategies for Improving Reading Skills

Learning Objectives
The students will be able
• To know about reading skills
• To understand the different strategies that can help in improving reading skills

Reading
Definition:
• Reading is a receptive skill.
• The process of decoding written symbols to arrive at meaning.
• The process of deriving meaning from written symbols.
• "Reading" is the process of looking at a series of written symbols and getting meaning from them.

Strategies for Improving Reading Skills
1. Predicting
• A prediction is what you think will happen based upon the text, the author, and background
knowledge.
• Prediction is an educated guess as to what will happen.
• It allows students to use information from the text, such as titles, headings, pictures and diagrams
to anticipate what will happen in the story (Bailey, 2015).

1. Predicting
• When making predictions, students envision what will come next in the text, based on their prior
knowledge.
• Predicting encourages children to actively think ahead and ask questions.
• It also allows students to understand the story better, make connections to what they are reading,
and interact with the text.

2. Visualizing
• also known as Making Mental Images or Creating Mind Movies.
• is the creation of images in the mind as the student reads, processes and recalls what has been read.
• Visualizing a picture or scene with the words and phrases allows the reader to organize the ideas, to
see the relationship among the ideas, and to make meaningful connections with them.

3. Making Connections
• is another strategy that can be used in the reading process.
• By making connections, the learners can activate their prior knowledge and connect the ideas in
the text to their own experiences.
• Reading becomes meaningful when the reader connects the ideas in the text to their experiences
and beliefs, and the things happening in the outer world.

“Text-to-Text”, “Text-to-Self” and “Text-to-World” is a strategy that helps students make
connections.
Text-to-Self
• Students can make text-to-self connections through drawing, making a chart, or writing.
• Teachers might ask students if they have ever experienced anything like the events in the text.

Text-to-Text
• Students can make text-to-text connections through drawing, making a chart, writing, and graphic
organizers.
• These text-to-text connections could be based upon how characters in the story relate to each
other, or how story elements relate between stories.

Text-to-World
• Students can make text-to-world connections through drawing, making a chart, writing, or graphic
organizers.
• Text-to-world connections could be done by comparing characters in a story to characters today or
comparing the content of the text to the world today.

4. Summarizing
The process of summarization requires the reader
• to determine what is important when reading, and
• to condense the information in the readers own words.
During the summarizing process, the students will be able to distinguish the main ideas from the
supporting ideas.

4. Summarizing
• Distinguishing the related knowledge from the unrelated ones is another point in the summarizing
process which will help students’ capacity to improve text comprehension.
• Summarizing is a strategy which helps the students to organize the ideas even in the long reading
passages which are usually perceived as threat for the students.

5. Questioning
• Questions help a reader clarify ideas and deepen understanding.
• If you ask questions as you read, you are awake, you are thinking.
• Diving in with questions - even those that are unanswerable - enriches the reading experience.

5. Questioning
• Questions lead you to new ideas, new perspectives, and additional questions.
• Some questions don’t have easy answers. But all questions inspire thinking, generate discussion,
or lead you to other sources.
• Readers can use the questioning before, during, and after reading.

6. Inferring
• refers to reading between the lines.
• Students need to use their own knowledge along with information from the text to draw their own
conclusions.

6. Inferring
Through inferring, students will be able to
• draw conclusions
• make predictions
• identify underlying themes
• use information to create meaning from text, and
• use pictures to create meaning.

References
1. Improving Reading Skills Through Effective Reading Strategies by Hülya Küçükoğlu, Available
online at www.sciencedirect.com

Strategies for Improving Reading Skills

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