Reading strategies

When we read English texts, whether it is newspaper articles, short stories or poems, the main goal is most of the time a global comprehension of the text.  It is not necessary to understand every word in order to understand what a text in English is about.  The main goal when we read most English texts is to achieve a global understanding of the text. Below you find some useful reading strategies to achieve this purpose.

Here are some useful reading strategies:
1. Use your real world information. Do you know anything about this topic or related topics from before?
2. Look at the title of the text and the headings, and use these to find out what the text is about. If  the text does not have headings you can write your own headings to the different paragraphs in the text.
3. Look at the illustrations. Do they tell you what the text is about?
4. Read in between the lines; what do you think happens next? What are your guesses?
5. Use the context to predict meaning.
5. Read for meaning; do not look up every word.

A lot of pupils believe that reading means that you are able to read a text aloud. Others believe that to read a foreign language is to read one word at the time, and to try to learn the text by heart. But the purpose of reading is to be able to achieve a global understanding of the text. Instead of reading the way a lot of students hav a tendencay to read, namely " bottom up"; from word to meaning,  you should read "top down; that is from meaning to word. Because to read is to create a meaning from what you already know.  It is to predict what is going to happen next .

Frank Smith has written about the purpose of reading in a good way:
"Reading is asking questions to printed text. And reading with comprehension becomes a matter of getting your questions answered." Frank Smith in Reading Without Nonsense ( 1997).