One of our Grade 4 teachers gave me this great explanation about Skimming, Scanning, Speed reading, and Narrative reading:
There are four types of reading we do almost everyday for one reason or another. Each one takes you deeper into the meaning of a book, magazine article, website or text. These reading types are useful as individual skills also. Read on!
Just on the surface… SKIMMING – We do this to quickly look over a piece of writing and take in the illustrations to see if we can get a very quick idea of what the text is about…Like if you were skimming a stone over water. This takes about 10 seconds.
E.g. – This is useful for non-fiction texts to see if what we are looking at will be useful to use for a research task.
Just below the surface…
SCANNING – We do this when we are looking for something in particular. We FOCUS ON A KEY WORD, and when we find it, we read ‘around’ the word. Read the rest of the sentence (also the sentence before and after) to see if this is useful to you or not. It’s like looking just below the surface… what do you see? Does it attract your attention? Should you look deeper?
Dip your head under…
SPEED READING – We do this when you want to get a quick general idea of what a whole text is about. It is a very QUICK type of reading; we may not read all the little words, and we do not understand everything of what we are reading. For example – you might use this type of reading if you need to refresh your memory about something you read before. This does not take very long. You usually don’t use intonation or emotion when you speed read. It is very monotone.
Practice speed reading something out loud to a partner to hear what it is like.
Dive right in...
NARRATIVE READING – This is reading at a normal speed, reading every word, which lets us have the opportunity to really understand what is being read.
This is the kind of reading you do all the time.
It is the one that is necessary for you to have full comprehension of what you are reading.
There are four types of reading we do almost everyday for one reason or another. Each one takes you deeper into the meaning of a book, magazine article, website or text. These reading types are useful as individual skills also. Read on!
Just on the surface… SKIMMING – We do this to quickly look over a piece of writing and take in the illustrations to see if we can get a very quick idea of what the text is about…Like if you were skimming a stone over water. This takes about 10 seconds.
E.g. – This is useful for non-fiction texts to see if what we are looking at will be useful to use for a research task.
Just below the surface…
SCANNING – We do this when we are looking for something in particular. We FOCUS ON A KEY WORD, and when we find it, we read ‘around’ the word. Read the rest of the sentence (also the sentence before and after) to see if this is useful to you or not. It’s like looking just below the surface… what do you see? Does it attract your attention? Should you look deeper?
Dip your head under…
SPEED READING – We do this when you want to get a quick general idea of what a whole text is about. It is a very QUICK type of reading; we may not read all the little words, and we do not understand everything of what we are reading. For example – you might use this type of reading if you need to refresh your memory about something you read before. This does not take very long. You usually don’t use intonation or emotion when you speed read. It is very monotone.
Practice speed reading something out loud to a partner to hear what it is like.
Dive right in...
NARRATIVE READING – This is reading at a normal speed, reading every word, which lets us have the opportunity to really understand what is being read.
This is the kind of reading you do all the time.
It is the one that is necessary for you to have full comprehension of what you are reading.