We are always reading!

As we've heard in the video, there is text all around us these days. It's not limited to what you consciously read at home, work, or school. Sometimes we are not even aware of it, but it's there, and we read it. We read a lot more than we might think these days. For example, maybe this morning you checked messages on your phone, read today's news, checked a train timetable, followed signs to a platform, noticed a poster advertising a music concert, and read emails. And that was just at the start of the day! Let's take it a step further and reflect on the purposes of reading and how it affects how we read. This is an important question when assessing reading ability. So, what could be the purpose of the reading activities we mentioned above? For example, you might have checked messages on your phone to see at what time you will be meeting a friend for lunch. Sometimes it can be something very simple, like go to the right platform, and sometimes we can have multiple reasons for reading something, for example, when we check our emails, we may want to check if there are important messages first so that we can delete directly any spam and whatever we're not interested in reading. Then we might go on reading the rest of our messages in a different way according to what kind of messages they are. As we can see, the purpose we have for reading determines if we read something quickly or carefully and how much detail we need. For example, when checking messages, perhaps you were scanning the text to only find that piece of information. When reading a newspaper, it is likely you will first skim through it to see if there is anything interesting. Then you will read interesting articles in detail, such as a story about your town. A teacher might read a research project for some students. This is a typical example of intensive reading, as he or she is reading the text in detail to give feedback to the students about their research. If you read for pleasure in your free time, this is an example of extensive reading, because you are just interested in how a story progresses without any specific learning aims. ________________________________________ In short: In today's world, we are surrounded by written text and we read a lot more than we might think. It is very important to think about what we read and why because that changes the way we read. We can use different types of reading, according to our purpose: Skimming is when we go through a text quickly, just to understand what it is about and to see if we need to read it more carefully. We can also refer to it as reading for the gist. Scanning is another form of quick reading, which we use when we want to look for something specific within a text. We can also refer to it as reading for specific information. Intensive reading is a form of careful reading, when we need to pick up as many details as possible, usually in order to perform a task based on our reading. Extensive reading is what we do when we are reading something for pleasure. A useful way of thinking about these different types of reading is the difference between expeditious reading (quick reading, like in skimming and scanning, when we might not read all the words in a text) and careful reading (slower, more detailed, when we need to understand the material thoroughly and check our comprehension). It is crucial that we test both types of reading because we want our test to have positive washback, so we need to think about how we read different types of texts to set suitable tasks. ________________________________________ Discussion Write a list of what you have read in the last 24 hours and think about the purpose of each reading activity and how it changed your way of reading. How surprised were you by how much you have read? Share your thoughts (and your list, if you want) in the comments below. British Council

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