Flexibility increases the readers’ potential to vary his speed of reading to meet either his purpose in reading or to fit the difficulty in reading material. The following reading rates are quite relevant to our discussion.
Skimming rate: This is extremely fast reading. This involves a quick survey of a passage or text, either to get a general grasp of what the content is all about or to decide on it relevance to your immediate needs,. It is also used when locating specific into
Rapid reading: This is used for deriving the central thought, to get specific into or to identity specific info
Normal rate: This is fair slow, steady and purposeful reading during which the reader quickly locates specific information taking note of the main point in the text.
Careful rate: This is a type of reading which is very slow and thoughtful. This type relates to serious academic exercise. The focus is to read to master content and relevant details to evaluate materials critically, to outline, summarize or paraphrase, to analyze the author style and idea to follow chronological arrangement of details and to solve practical problems.
A text maker in particular demand on the reader who has to decode it using four main reading strategies
The teaching of reading takes place in school and at home by trying to read text types literary(stories, poems, plays), expository(guidebooks, newspapers), procedural(instruction manuals, recipe books), references(encyclopedias, dictionaries)
Skilled reader are considered to use four kinds of comprehension, literal (reading between lines) critical or appreciative (appreciating and understanding an authors use of parody, irony, humor and satire, metaphor, allusion and imagery), reorganizational (piercing together their understanding in other to make sense of text and perhaps present the text in different ways)
Proficient reading depends on the ability to recognize words quickly and effortlessly. If word recognition is difficult, students use too much of their processing capacity to read individual words, which interferes with their ability to comprehend what is read.
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