What Are the Skills Involved in Reading Comprehension?

What is reading comprehension？

Understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible. For example, we apply different reading strategies when looking at a notice board to see if there is an advertisement for a particular type of flat and when carefully reading an article of special interest in a scientific journal. Yet locating the relevant advertisement on the board and understanding the new information contained in the article demonstrates that the reading purpose in each case has been successfully fulfilled. In the first case, a competent reader will quickly reject the irrelevant information and find what he is looking for. In the second case, it is not enough to understand the gist of the text, more detailed comprehension is necessary.

Why do we read?

As Chinese students, we have started learning English since the first year we entered the junior school. We used to read articles aloud in the morning standing in the crowded classroom, recite strange passages under the dim lamplight in our bedrooms until night. However, the real goal of learning English is always confusing us. Not until finished the college entrance examination did I realize that I have to think about this troublesome question. Now, I find the most significant aim in learning English is enabling us to have the ability to read articles in magazines and different data written in English. Why do we read? There are two main reasons for reading: reading for pleasure and reading for information(in order to find out something or in order to do something with the information you get). It is called reading comprehension. As far as I am concerned, the first step to improve reading comprehension is to find out the skills involved in it ,then pay attention to them, or we will stay in the gap of English learning and exam-oriented learning forever.

3.The skills involved in reading comprehension

-Understanding conceptual meaning

-Understanding the communicative value of sentences and utterances

-Understanding relations within the sentence

-Understanding relations between the parts of a text through lexical cohesion devices

-Understanding cohesion between parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices

-Interpreting text by going outside it

-Recognizing indicators in discourse

-Identifying the main point or important information in a piece of discourse

-Distinguishing the main idea from supporting details

-Extracting salient points to summarize the