Ielts course

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Important information

Reading skills

These are the seven reading skills.
1 Previewing a text means looking at things like the heading and layout of a text to get an idea of what the text is about before starting to read. For instance, before reading an article in a newspaper, we look at the headline and/or the picture so we have an idea of what it’s about, and can decide whether we want to read it. We know, for instance, that it is a newspaper article rather than an advert by the way it looks.
Previewing is an important skill because it helps us to anticipate the content and this makes it easier to understand the text.
2 Predicting content and structure involves using your knowledge of the topic of the text to guess what it’s going to be about. For instance, if you see an advert for a car, you can guess that the purpose of the text will be to sell the car and that there is likely to be vocabulary related to cars.
Predicting is an important reading skill because we can make more sense of a text if we use what we know already about the topic.
3 Skimming for main ideas means reading a text quite quickly for a general idea of the overall topic. When we do this, we are looking for main ideas rather than specific details. For instance, we might skim a review of a film to get a general idea of what it’s about before deciding whether to go and see it.
Skimming is an important skill because if our purpose is to get a general idea about something, we don’t need to read the text carefully. In life we often don’t have time to read everything in detail!
4 Scanning to find key information also involves reading a text quite quickly, but we use this reading skill when we want to find a particular fact. For instance, we might scan a TV guide to find out what time a particular program is on.
Scanning is an important skill that we use every day to find out facts such as times, dates or places.