What are the English reading skills?

When reading English materials or taking exams, many people feel that their reading speed really can't keep up with their own needs. Some friends feel that their English foundation is not good, and then they try their best to memorize words. In fact, if they can use the right methods to train fast reading, they can even significantly improve their reading speed on the original basis, not to mention that in many cases they are not English at all.

The problem of language foundation. Now let's look at four ways to practice fast reading.

1. Fast extensive reading

Usually, we should develop the habit of fast extensive reading. Extensive reading here refers to extensive reading of a large number of books involving different fields, which requires fast reading, understanding and mastering the main contents of books. Determine a clear reading quota, which should be practical and more or less combined with your own reality. For example, if you read 20 pages a day and a semester is calculated as 18 weeks, you can read 2 1 book with medium thickness (each book has about 120 pages).

Step 2 read regularly

Develop the habit of reading on time after class. Regular reading can be done for 5 ~ 10 minutes at a time, not too long. Because reading fast at a fixed time, you are highly concentrated. After a long time, you are easy to get tired and distracted, but it is boring. When reading, write down the "start time", after reading, write down the "end time" and calculate the reading speed. Write it down casually and stick to it for a long time, and it will certainly receive obvious results.

Step 3 skim the floating foam

Skimming, also called reading and skipping or skimming, is a special and very practical fast reading skill. Skimming means reading as quickly as possible, just like having a bird's eye view of the obvious signs on the ground from the plane, and getting the main idea or central idea of the article quickly. In other words, skimming requires readers to read selectively. In order to grasp the outline of the article and speed up reading, some details can be skipped. According to statistics, a well-trained skimmer can read 3,000 to 4,000 words per minute.

When reading, first skim the article to see if there are any materials and information that you need or are interested in, and then determine whether this article is worth reading carefully. When looking for information, if there is not enough time and you don't need a high degree of understanding, you can use skimming skills. "You don't need a high level of understanding" does not mean that the level of understanding can be very low when skimming, but that the level of understanding is allowed to be slightly lower than the general reading speed.

The goal of general reading is to reach the highest possible level of understanding, usually 70% or 80%, while maintaining the general reading speed. When skimming, the expected understanding level is slightly lower, with an average understanding rate of 50% or 60%.

Skimming has the following four characteristics:

(1) read a lot of materials at a very fast speed, looking for the main information literally or in fact and a small amount of explanatory information.

(2) You can skip a part or not watch a part.

(3) The level of understanding can be slightly lower, but not too low.

(4) Adjust the reading speed flexibly according to the difficulty and purpose of the article.

Skimming can use the following techniques:

(1) We should make use of printing details, such as titles, subheadings, subheadings, italics, bold characters, footnotes, punctuation marks, etc. Preview books and articles. To predict skimming, we should understand the author's thinking and the way (mode) of the article, so as to grasp the general idea, relevant details and their relationship of the article.

(2) Read the first and second paragraphs at the beginning of the article at the general reading speed (200 ~ 250 wpm), and try to grasp the general idea, background, author's style, tone or intonation of the article.

(3) Read the topic sentence and conclusion sentence of the paragraph. By grasping the topic sentence, grasping the main idea of the paragraph, and then omitting the details, we can get the skimming speed.

(4) Pay attention to turning words and sequential words. Turning words such as how, more, other, etc. Sequential words first, second, and so on.

(5) If it is not necessary, don't look at the details.

4.？ Scan (scan)

Search reading is also called scanning. Like skimming, search reading is also a fast reading skill. Skilled readers are good at obtaining specific information through search, thus improving reading efficiency.

Search reading is a fast reading method to quickly find a specific fact or a specific information from a large number of materials, such as people, events, time, place, numbers and so on. , and omit other irrelevant parts. Using this method, readers can browse as many printed materials as possible in the shortest time and find the information they need. For example, you can use this method to find the running time of train or bus at the station, the flight time of airport flight, the book catalogue of the library, a certain date, name, number or number in the essay.

As a reading skill to find information quickly, it requires both speed and accuracy. Specifically, looking for reading has a clear purpose and chooses the answers to the questions in a targeted way. Therefore, the whole paragraph can be directly reflected in the brain without reading word for word. When the eyes pass over the printed materials, once the relevant contents are found, we should stop for a while to memorize or take them down, which not only ensures the reading speed, but also ensures the accuracy, so the reading skills are also of great practical value. Searching is different from skimming. When skimming, the reader knows nothing about the material in advance, while the search is carried out when the reader knows something about the material. For example, when looking up a phone book, the reader knows the name of the recipient, and the phone book is arranged alphabetically by last name. In this way, when looking for Jackson's phone number, you can use the word logo at the top of the page, and then quickly turn to the page that starts with J and is arranged alphabetically by surname, so as to find the phone page number under Jackson's name.

In order to search effectively, readers should use the following techniques.

(1) Use the arrangement of materials. Most materials are arranged in alphabetical order. Such as dictionaries, indexes, postal code books, telephone books and other reference books. Of course, not all the materials are arranged alphabetically. For example, TV programs are arranged by date and time. Historical materials are arranged by year, and sports pages in newspapers are arranged by competition category (football, volleyball, tennis). No matter what the source of data is, it is arranged in a logical way. For example, to know when something happened, check the date; Who did what? Look up names, etc.

(2) Use chapter titles and descriptions. After reading it, read the title of the article or chapter first to determine whether the article contains the material you need, or which part contains what material, so that you can turn directly to that part to find it.

(3) Grasp the prompt words. The reader finds the chapter that contains the required information and is ready to read it. At this time, pay attention to the hints related to that specific information. For example, in the sports section of the newspaper, looking for a certain performance of a track and field athlete, his country name is a hint. Looking for new york's name in the encyclopedia, after turning to the chapter of new york City, words such as population, census and residents are all hints. If you find the prompt, you can use the general reading speed to get the information you need.

The above is the introduction of four quick practice methods. In fact, we have used these methods in our daily life and study, but we don't realize it. Once we choose them as methods respectively, and then keep practicing according to their requirements, we will achieve good results. This also shows that there are many ways to improve reading speed around us, and the key depends on how you explore these methods.