What is Intensive Reading
Intensive Reading
What is also called Study Reading. It involves close study of the text. As the amount of comprehension should be high, the speed of reading is correspondingly slower. So, here is a guiding principle of any reading activity, you should know the purpose for reading before you actually begin to read. However, simple and obvious as this may seem, it rarely happens.
Cognitive skills of comprehension
The competent reader- the fully literate person- uses not one skill but many, which have been acquired through specific practice. Among the cognitive skills of comprehension are:
I. Ability to anticipate both the form and the content
II. Ability to identify the main idea
III. Ability to recognize and recall specific details
IV. Ability to recognize the relationship between the main ideas and their expansion
V. Ability to follow a sequenced events instructions, stages of argument
VI. Ability to interpret the text (reading between the lines)
VII. Ability to draw conclusions and ability to recognize the writer’s purpose and attitude
1. Identifying the Main Idea
A competent reader- reads the passage in order to give a title; read the Passage in order to select the most appropriate title from those given. The type of reading used for such practices is skimming, since the aim is to avoid close and slow reading of the text for all details. A competent reader- also identifies the topic sentence, that is, find and underlines this.
A paragraph will often, but not always have a topic or key sentences. This is often a generalization or a summary exemplified or expanded in other sentences of the paragraph. It helps readers to understand a text if he can identify the key thus acting as markers to the organization of the text.
2. Finding details in a text
In a telephone directory, let’s say you are to find somebody’s number in 20 seconds in a newspaper, who scored the most goals? How many people were injured In the explosion? How many Minister were appointed, etc.
The type of reading practiced here is called scanning. One useful technique to use for this work is the information gap technique, whereby the reader has to fill in the missing information on a worksheet by scanning through a text which has the required information.
3. Following a Sequence
A learner who realizes that his reading involves some form of sequence (that is, related items in a particular order) is able to understand a lot of the text, even there are some unknown words. For example, a text describing some kind of process, where sequence is important.
4. Inferring from the Text
Together with identifying the Main Idea is the ability to infer (reading between the lines); something called a manipulative thinking skill. Whereas reading for literal meaning focuses on what is explicitly stated, we often go beyond the explicitly conjectures to work out what is implied in the text. In short, we think as we read. Of course, inferring presupposes literal understanding of text. It is not an alternative, but a higher level of comprehension.
5. Recognizing a Writer’s purpose and attitude
The writer’s purpose could be to ridicule/amuse, protest, accuse, teach etc. Readers should therefore be on the lookout for any of these.
6. Recognizing Discourse features
A text will consist of discourse, that is, a combination of interrelated sentences. The combination is formed in various ways. For instance, words will belong as members of the same lexical field, so that a text of football will have words like goal, foul, outside kick, head, pass etc. But for text held together by other cohesive means; for instance, read the following passage:
“Mary was feeling unhappy. There were several reasons for this. First, she had lost her purse. Secondly, she had just missed the last bus. Thirdly, her father had insisted she should be home before 11pm or 12pm. Fourthly, she had not likes the film. But just then, she remembered that she began her holidays so the next day, she left feeling a little better.”
In the above passage, we can identify discourse features as follows:
I. “this”, “she”, “her”, as substitutes referring back to previous statements
II. “first”, “secondly”, “thirdly”, “fourthly”, signal a list of some sort
III. “but” indicates a change or contrast relating to some previous statement. “so” introduces a consequence of results on previous events. A good reader knows the significance of those markers which help him understand the text. For example, on encountering the sequence, marker “first”, the reader expects some kind listing to follow.
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