Notes: The Reading Skill | English Language & Pedagogy for CTET & TET Exams - CTET & State TET PDF Download

Introduction

• Reading is a receptive skill and highly valuable, enabling a reader to read the written form as meaningful language and to mentally interact with the message. Reading can be silent (in our head) or aloud (so that other people can hear) and extensive (non-detailed) and intensive (detailed). The skills involved in reading range from literal comprehension, inference (reading between the lines), re-organisation and reinterpretation of what has been read and the reader’s personal response. To read effectively, one must overcome the linguistic difficulties, such as unfamiliar vocabulary, difficult pronunciation and complicated grammar structures. Skilled reading is constructive, fluent, strategic and motivated.
• A skilled reader learns to reason out written material, using knowledge from everyday life and from disciplined fields of study. The reader has mastery of basic processes, to the point where they are automatic, so that attention is freed for the analysis of meaning and he/she is able to sustain attention. Certain abilities must be developed that work together to create strong reading skills. These core abilities include phonemic awareness, alpha- betic principle, sound-spelling correspondence, decoding ability, spelling, vocabulary, writing skills and comprehension skills. Reading techniques include the ERRQ technique (Estimate, Read, Respond and Question). The objective here is to lead a learner to inter- act productively and actively with a text and become a good reader. In the SQRRR tech- nique, the reader surveys the chapter, questions are framed, reads section wise, recites the answer and reviews the entire section. Another reading technique is the S-RUN, where the reader surveys the text, reads section wise, underlines the key ideas and makes notes. The advantage here is that the reader has concise notes and subordinate ideas.

Methods to Teach Reading Skill

• Pick Me Out 
  Objective: To help learners scan.
  Method: Ask learners to read a paragraph. When they have finished reading, they look back, pick out five words or phrases, which tell them about a particular idea/theme/character. The list is compared with his partner’s list. 
• Comic Hour 
  Objective: To learn punctuation.
  Method: Ask learners to read a favourite comic. Taking up any one comic strip, they encircle all the punctuation marks, using different coloured pens for each punctuation mark and explain why each has been used. 
• Summarize Me 
  Objective: To improve the learners’ skill in focussing on details.
  Method: After reading a prose lesson, the learners summarize it in the form of a flow chart. Provide a flow chart in skeletal form for them to fill in the points. 
• Change Me
  Objective: To focus on the learners’ imagination.
  Method: Learners read the poem. In groups, they discuss alternative titles, giving reasons for their choices.