In the latest in her series of blog posts designed to help you prepare your students for IELTS, Pauline Cullen, author of The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS, offers some advice on IELTS reading skills.
What do we mean by skimming and scanning when it comes to reading skills?
These are terms I’ve used a lot in my IELTS books but I’m often made aware that students aren’t really clear on what is meant by this and one of the participants in last week’s webinar asked for further ideas on how to teach these skills.
Why do students need these skills?
Well, every question in the reading test has one clear purpose: to force you to use specific reading skills. Using those skills effectively will help you to complete the tasks within the time you are given. Skimming and scanning are two key reading skills that students are being tested on in the reading test.
What do these words mean?
Scanning means quickly searching a passage for a particular word or term (e.g. a name or a date).
Skimming means reading quickly without reading every word so that you get an overall impression of a text or part of a text.
What I’ve tried to do both in the Official Guide and in my Vocab books is to show that skimming is a pre-reading idea, where you focus on the overall message, while scanning is the skill you can use to locate relevant parts of a text before answering a question. For scanning, in my vocab books I often included exercises where students are given a list of words and then asked to quickly locate these in the text, and then later there is a focus on what these words mean.
How do these skills work in practice in the IELTS reading test?
Skimming is used for:
1) pre-reading the text for the overall meaning, and
2) when answering questions, to quickly check if you have located the correct part of a text once you have scanned for a key word or idea.
An example of how this would work is with matching tasks where you have to match a person to a theory, for example. In the test you would:
– scan the text quickly for the names of the different people and underline each one in the text. (NB the names often appear several times within a text)
– skim read the text before and after each of the names you found to narrow down your options. (You should be able quite quickly to rule out at least a couple at this point based on the topic that each speaker is talking about and the information in the question you are answering.)
– read in detail the parts of the text you are left with to make your final choice and answer the question.
How can you teach or practise these skills?
In my webinars I have mentioned ‘guided reading’ of a passage to help lower level students cope with reading passages. It occurred to me last night that this could also be a good way for teachers to approach skimming with higher levels. For example, you could flash the passage one paragraph at a time onto a screen (if you have access to that sort of resource), and only allow 30 seconds before the next paragraph appears. Initially, after each paragraph, you could ask a general question to see how much the students got out of it and then work up to only asking checking questions at the end of the whole passage.
For self-study students, you could ask yourself questions such as ‘what type of passage is this?’ (Is it describing something; arguing for or against something etc.) “what is the main topic?” or ‘is the tone positive, negative to neutral?’ For teachers, you could also brainstorm what your class got from the passage after skim reading and pool everyone’s ideas together. If you do this routinely with reading texts for several weeks then I’m sure that would have the effect of training them in this skill. It would be helpful to find a way to measure any progress to see if, after 3 or 4 weeks they were actually getting more out of a text by this method. Teachers, if you’re stuck for questions, then speed read the passage yourself and write down any key ideas or impressions you got from that and let that be the focus of your questions.
I think that once you’ve established exactly what skimming and scanning are, the best way to practise this for the test is to make it a natural part of answering every IELTS reading question.
Read the other posts in this series:
Help with IELTS #1: Writing
Help with IELTS #2: Speaking
Help with IELTS #3: tips for the Academic Reading test
Help with IELTS #4: How many?
Help with IELTS #5: Skimming and scanning
Help with IELTS #6: expressing your opinion