Reading - Key Skills

There are three key Reading skills that you need to master in order to score highly on the test. These are:

• Skimming

• Scanning

• Detailed reading

In addition, we need to understand:

• How to use context

• The importance of ‘topic sentences’

Believe it or not, ‘Skimming’ and ’Scanning’ are ways of reading which are actually already familiar to you.

When you read a piece of text in your own language, do you slowly read each individual word and think about what every word means?

No, of course you don’t.

You read through it quickly, getting meaning from keywords and chunks of language that make up phrases. (Skimming)

If you are trying to find specific information in the text, you’ll look for the words or numbers closely related to that topic. (Scanning)

In other words, every day in your own language, you skim and scan the text just as you need to do in your exam.

In this series of posts, we will look at each of these key skills in turn. We will understand exactly how to use them, and I will show you exactly how they help us save time and find the correct answer.