(Reading skills) Types and Importance in 2020

Reading skills can be defined as the ability to understand the written text and conclude in your mind what you have understood. Many English learners think to enhance their reading skills as it helps a lot in improving grammatical mistakes.

What’s for you?

1. Introduction
2. Types of Reading and its Importance
3. How to improve Reading skills
4. Best apps for Enhance your Reading skills
5. Conclusion
6. FAQS

Introduction

In this guide, you will know about:

• Why reading skills matters
• What to read
• Tips of reading

Why reading skills matters:

You probably know that how reading is important as it helps in learning the language faster and completely. You must build a habit of reading daily to know the proper spelling of words and improve your pronunciation. As reading is an essential skill you must have if you are an English learner.

You get to know more new words daily and can enhance your vocabulary. Reading is also helpful in writing skills as the chances are almost zero of committing mistakes in writing.

What to read:

Are you confused about what to read? Just explore new things in which you are interested in or read your favorite person biography as well. There are a number of articles and blogs available online that can be read without spending even a single penny. That’s why I suggested reading the material you are interested in and have fun.

There are many free ebooks available online which you can read easily on your smartphone in free time.

Many applications such as credit, Tumblr, etc, just pick an article related to your interest and start reading. You can also go for documentaries and poetries that are absolutely available online for free.

Tips of reading:

Here are some tips of reading are recommended:

Start Reading with an easy language in terms of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary as it will be easy for you to understand it at the initial level.

While start reading, spending on books and articles doesn’t make sense because you are starting and not a pro-level reader. Find free books, free articles, etc for making reading a habit, just find all the free material available on the internet and start reading.

Try to do listening and reading at the same time also helps to improve your pronunciation skills as well. While watching Hollywood movies, just click on the subtitles and listen to it while reading also.

When you reached the next level, try to pick articles and documentaries which are not very easy and too difficult. You can also approach tutor about your difficulty level and they will help you to pick some mediocre level articles.

Types of Reading and its Importance

Reading is important for you to learn language skills, not only in English if you want to learn any language in the world, you must have to build a reading habit and the material of reading should be in that language which is learning by you.

Reading is important also to find the ingredients mentioned on the product you are going to eat. Like many people don’t want an egg or non-veg ingredients etc so they can read on the bottle or product.

Here are the 4 types of reading mentioned below:

• Scanning
• Skimming
• Extensive
• Intensive

Scanning:

The aim of this type of scanning reading is to find the necessary information in the written text. In scanning, one doesn’t go to understand all the written information but the only focus is to find the needful information from the text.

Skimming:

In skimming reading the main focus is to find that the information is useful or you are interested in that kind of information or not? You find it quickly but carefully just like scanning.

For example – You go to the book fair, judge the book by its cover or index, and then purchase it.

Extensive:

Extensive reading is defined as gathering new information while enjoying and having fun along with. In extensive reading one reads material in general to explore something new and the focus is on understanding rather than the meaning.

The purpose of extensive reading is relaxed while gathering new and interesting information in general. The best example of Extensive reading is Magazine, comics novels!

Intensive:

The purpose of Intensive reading is to develop reading skills with a goal or aim focused on that information. In Intensive, it really helps to understand and focuses on grammar language. It is considered a serious and decent type of reading not just like Extensive is for joy and fun. It helps a lot for English learners to learn the language fast and better with the minimization of grammatical mistakes.

You can also check our another blog on English Language History.

How to improve Reading skills

There are many sources where you can improve your reading skills but I would suggest you build a reading habit first and try to read the topic you are interested in and also that topic should not be too tough, not too easy.

Trying to read a lot of material can be tough, especially if that material is not in your first language. I will suggest some basic techniques here which help you to read more by spending less time and it also helps to improve your reading skills.

Read as often as possible

As I said earlier and many times, Practice makes a man perfect, so read as much as possible as practice will make you a better reader. You don’t need to read articles or news every time as you can also read bulletin boards or banners taglines on the street, menu, or just anything you see in English every day.

Read material you are interested in

Just because you are reading English, doesn’t mean you have to read English topics you are not interested in. You should read something which you think might create interest in, In fact, reading about something you are interested in can boost up your reading skills because you already know about a bit.

For example- You are interested in cryptocurrency, you could read the latest crypto news, related articles of crypto and its history, etc.

Practice scanning for specific information

As discussed above the purpose of scanning to find the necessary information from the written text. Sometimes you may not have time to read everything but you need to find specific necessary information from the written text.

For example – You are planning to buy a property somewhere and you need to know the price fit in your budget, Using your favorite search engine, scan for that specific keyword you can find the needful information. As for the same you need to develop and practice scanning to find the needful information from the written text you are reading.

Visualize

While you are reading something try to create an image in front of your mind related to what you are reading. Try to visualize things as much as possible. If you are reading a novel, try to make a movie in front of your eyes. If you are reading news, try to create an image in your mind. This will help a lot to speed up your reading and improve your reading skills as well.

Also read: Top 4 English Accents in the world

Best apps for Enhance your Reading skills

In the modern times, all of you might be using smartphones, so why don’t you take advantage of it?

There are a number of applications available both for ios users and android users that can help you to keep updated and will also help in enhancing your reading skills. Most of the people use it to gather information about the relevant topic and many users use it for sharing their thoughts and ideas.

These are alike free platforms where people can share their thoughts and ideas regarding their relevant topic for free and get likes and comments by the users who consume that sharable data for free.

I will suggest the best apps where you can enhance your reading skills for free:

Reddit:

Reddit is the best app available on play store and app store, you can use it for reading articles for free. Just open the Reddit app and tick the categories you are interested in and start reading them as it will help in improving your reading skills.

Tumblr:

Tumblr is also a social platform where your interests connect you with your people, as it is just like the Reddit app, you just have to pick topics from the given categories and start consuming the information shared by the people or you can search about any topic according to your interest as well.

Flipboard:

In Flipboard app you will find the world’s stories as magazines can also be read in this app. With a variety of interests to explore and people to follow there is something for everyone, just pick your interest and it creates a magazine for you.

TOI:

TOI is the news app developed by the famous news agency Times of India. It provides you the latest English News from cricket to politics and Business to travel where you can also read news according to your interests and also helps a lot in improving your reading skills.

Conclusion

Reading skills are very important as it helps in grooming your English. One must enhance reading skills with the help of free apps discussed above.

FAQS