SPEED READING (SKIMMING AND SCANNING)
Skimming and scanning are two specific speed-reading techniques, which enable you to cover a vast amount of material very rapidly.
SKIMMING
Skimming is reading for an overview of the material, to get a general idea of what the text is about. It helps the reader form a general opinion about the text. It’s a method of rapidly moving your eyes over the text to get only the main ideas and a general impression of the text. Skimming is the most rapid of all reading. It doesn’t require reading every word. It is a useful study technique for reading course books or reading for assignments. If students first skim through the chapter to get a general idea and then go back to read in detail, they will better understand it.
How to Skim:
* Read the title.
* Read the introduction or the first paragraph.
* Read the first sentence of every other paragraph.
* Read any headings and sub-headings.
* Notice any pictures, charts, or graphs.
* Notice any italicized or boldface words or phrases.
* Read the summary or last paragraph.

SKIMMING EXERCISE # 1:
Here is a reading passage. Read ONLY the first line of each paragraph. Do not read the whole paragraph. Then answer the questions at the end.

READING PASSAGE
Here I want to try to give you an answer to the question: What personal qualities are desirable in a teacher? Probably no two people would draw up exactly similar lists, but I think the following would be generally accepted.
First, the teacher's personality should be pleasantly live and attractive. This does not rule out people who are physically plain, or even ugly, because many such have great personal charm. But it does rule out such types as the over-excitable, melancholy, frigid, sarcastic, cynical, frustrated, and over-bearing : I would say too, that it excludes all of dull or purely negative personality. I still stick to what I said in my earlier book: that school children probably 'suffer more from bores than from brutes'.
Secondly, it is not merely desirable but essential for a teacher to have a genuine capacity for sympathy - in the literal meaning of that word; a capacity to tune in to the minds and feelings of other people, especially, since most teachers are school teachers, to the minds and feelings of children. Closely related with this is the capacity to be tolerant - not, indeed, of what is wrong, but of the frailty and immaturity of human nature which induce people, and again especially children, to make mistakes.
Thirdly, I hold it essential for a teacher to be both intellectually and morally honest. This does not mean being a plaster saint. It means that he will be aware of his intellectual strengths, and limitations, and will have thought about and decided upon the moral principles by which his life shall be guided. There is no contradiction in my going on to say that a teacher should be a bit of an actor. That is part of the technique of teaching, which demands that every now and then a teacher should be able to put on an act - to enliven a lesson, correct a fault, or award praise. Children, especially young children, live in a world that is rather larger than life.
A teacher must remain mentally alert. He will not get into the profession if of low intelligence, but it is all too easy, even for people of above-average intelligence, to stagnate intellectually - and that means to deteriorate intellectually. A teacher must be quick to adapt himself to any situation, however improbable and able to improvise, if necessary at less than a moment's notice. (Here I should stress that I use 'he' and 'his' throughout the book simply as a matter of convention and convenience.)
On the other hand, a teacher must be capable of infinite patience. This, I may say, is largely a matter of self-discipline and self-training; we are none of us born like that. He must be pretty resilient; teaching makes great demands on nervous energy. And he should be able to take in his stride the innumerable petty irritations any adult dealing with children has to endure.
Finally, I think a teacher should have the kind of mind which always wants to go on learning. Teaching is a job at which one will never be perfect; there is always something more to learn about it. There are three principal objects of study: the subject, or subjects, which the teacher is teaching; the methods by which they can best be taught to the particular pupils in the classes he is teaching; and - by far the most important - the children, young people, or adults to whom they are to be taught. The two cardinal principles of British education today are that education is education of the whole person, and that it is best acquired through full and active co-operation between two persons, the teacher and the learner.
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Top of Form
Bottom of Form

Questions: * What should be the title of this passage? Tick the most appropriate answer. 1. My favorite teacher 2. Why students don’t like some teachers 3. Qualities of a good teacher. * What is the purpose of the writer in writing this passage? Tick the most appropriate answer. 1. To criticize teachers 2. To give us news about teaching world 3. To give his opinions about qualities of a teacher.

SKIMMING EXERCISE # 2:
Read ONLY the first and the last paragraphs (that are underlined). Do not read the whole passage. Then answer the question at the end.
One important factor in reading is the voluntary, adaptive control of reading rate, i.e. the ability to adjust the reading rate to the particular type of material being read.
Adaptive reading means changing reading speed throughout a text in response to both the difficulty of material and one's purpose in reading it. Learning how to monitor and adjust reading style is a skill that requires a great deal of practice. Many people, even college students are unaware that they can learn to control their reading speed. However, this factor can be greatly improved with a couple of hundred hours of work, as opposed to the thousands of hours needed to significantly alter language comprehension. Many college reading skills programmes include a training procedure aimed at improving students' control of reading speed. However, a number of problems are involved in success-fully implementing such a programme. The first problem is to convince the students that they should adjust their reading rates. Many students regard skimming as a sin and read everything in a slow methodical manner. On the other hand some students believe that everything, including difficult mathematical texts, can be read at the rate appropriate for a light novel. There seems to be evidence that people read more slowly than necessary. A number of studies on college students have found that when the students are forced to read faster than their self-imposed rate, there is no loss in retention of information typically regarded as important.
The second problem involved in teaching adaptive reading lies in convincing the students of the need to be aware of their purposes in reading. The point of adjusting reading rates is to serve particular purposes. Students who are unaware of what they want to get out of a reading assignment will find it difficult to adjust their rates appropriately. They should know in advance what they want.
Once these problems of attitude are overcome, a reading skills course can concentrate on teaching the students the techniques for reading at different rates. Since most students have had little practice at rapid reading, most of the instruction focuses on how to read rapidly. Scanning is a rapid reading technique appropriate for searching out a piece of information embedded in a much larger text - for example a student might scan this passage for an evaluation of adaptive reading. A skilled scanner can process 10,000 or more words per minute. Obviously, at this rate scanners only pick up bits and pieces of information and skip whole paragraphs. It is easy for scanners to miss the target entirely, and they often have to rescan the text. Making quick decisions as to what should be ignored and what should be looked at takes practice. However, the benefits are enormous. I would not be able to function as an academic without this skill because I would not be able to keep up with all the information that is generated in my field. Skimming is the processing of about 800-1500 words a minute - a rate at which identifying every word is probably impossible. Skimming is used for extracting the gist of the text. The skill is useful when the skimmer is deciding whether to read a text, or is previewing a text he wants to read, or is going over material that is already known.
Both scanning and skimming are aided by a knowledge of where the main points tend to be found in the text. A reader who knows where an author tends to put the main points can read selectively. Authors vary in their construction style, and one has to adjust to author differences, but some general rules usually apply. Section headings, first and last paragraphs in a section, first and last sentences in a paragraph, and highlighted material all tend to convey the main points.
Students in reading skills programmes often complain that rapid reading techniques require hard work and that they tend to regress towards less efficient reading habits after the end of the programme. Therefore, it should be emphasised that the adaptive control of the reading rate is hard work because it is a novel skill. Older reading habits seem easy because they have been practised for longer. As students become more practised in adjusting reading rate, they find it easier. I can report that after practising variable reading rates for more than ten years, I find it easier to read a text using an adjustable rate than to read at a slow methodical word by word rate. This is something of a problem for me because part of my professional duties is to edit papers that I would not normally process word by word. I find it very painful to have to read at this rate. * What is the passage about? 1. Advantages of reading 2. The ability to adjust the speed of reading 3. Reading various types of texts
SCANNING
Scanning is reading something in order to locate specific information. It is useful for finding name, date, fact, statistics etc. without reading the whole reading passage. Scanning needs reading with attention and concentration and is a useful technique of speed reading.
How to Scan: * Keep in mind the specific information you are looking for. * Try to anticipate how the answer will appear and what clues you might use to help you locate the answer. For example, if you were looking for a certain date, you would quickly read the paragraph looking only for numbers. * Use headings and any other aids that will help you identify which sections might contain the information you are looking for. * Selectively read and skip through sections of the passage that you don’t need. * Let your eyes run rapidly over several lines at a time * When you have found the information you are looking for, read the entire sentence carefully.
SCANNING EXERCISE #1:
Read the text to find the answers to the following questions. 1. When were X-rays discovered?
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2. Who discovered them?
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3. What are the four characteristics of X-rays? 1) …………………………….

2) ……………………………..

3) ……………………………..

4) ……………………………..
The Discovery of X-rays
Except for a brief description of the Compton effect, and a few other remarks, we have postponed the discussion of X-rays until the present chapter because it is particularly convenient to treat X-ray spectra after treating optical spectra. Although this ordering may have given the reader a distorted impression of the historical importance of X-rays, this impression will be corrected shortly as we describe the crucial role played by X-rays in the development of modern physics.
X-rays were discovered in 1895 by Roentgen while studying the phenomena of gaseous discharge. Using a cathode ray tube with a high voltage of several tens of kilovolts, he noticed that salts of barium would fluoresce when brought near the tube, although nothing visible was emitted by the tube. This effect persisted when the tube was wrapped with a layer of black cardboard. Roentgen soon established that the agency responsible for the fluorescence originated at the point at which the stream of energetic electrons struck the glass wall of the tube. Because of its unknown nature, he gave this agency the name X-rays. He found that X-rays could manifest themselves by darkening wrapped photographic plates, discharging charged electroscopes, as well as by causing fluorescence in a number of different substances. He also found that X-rays can penetrate considerable thicknesses of materials of low atomic number, whereas substances of high atomic number are relatively opaque. Roentgen took the first steps in identifying the nature of X-rays by using a system of slits to show that (1) they travel in straight lines, and that (2) they are uncharged, because they are not deflected by electric or magnetic fields.
The discovery of X-rays aroused the interest of all physicists, and many joined in the investigation of their properties. In 1899 Haga and Wind performed a single slit diffraction experiment with X-rays which showed that (3) X-rays are a wave motion phenomenon, and, from the size of the diffraction pattern, their wavelength could be estimated to be 10-8 cm. In 1906 Barkla proved that (4) the waves are transverse by showing that they can be polarized by scattering from many materials.
There is, of course, no longer anything unknown about the nature of X-rays. They are electromagnetic radiation of exactly the same nature as visible light, except that their wavelength is several orders of magnitude shorter. This conclusion follows from comparing properties 1 through 4 with the similar properties of visible light, but it was actually postulated by Thomson several years before all these properties were known. Thomson argued that X-rays are electromagnetic radiation because such radiation would be expected to be emitted from the point at which the electrons strike the wall of a cathode ray tube. At this point, the electrons suffer very violent accelerations in coming to a stop and, according to classical electromagnetic theory, all accelerated charged particles emit electromagnetic radiations. We shall see later that this explanation of the production of X-rays is at least partially correct.
In common with other electromagnetic radiations, X-rays exhibit particle-like aspects as well as wave-like aspects. The reader will recall that the Compton effect, which is one of the most convincing demonstrations of the existence of quanta, was originally observed with electromagnetic radiation in the X-ray region of wavelengths.

SCANNING EXERCISE # 2:
Phoenix College
Registration Directory
Information Room 102
Hotel Management 103
Biology (day) 106
Biology (night) 107
History 207
All new students 110
Arabic 276
French 237
Drama 294
Sociology 203
Music 381
Accounting 294
Business Management 104
English as a Second Language 357
Spanish 311

Here is the information posted on a notice board of a college. Answer the following questions based on this information. 1. In which room should new students enroll for Sociology?
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2. Where can you get information about business management courses?
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3. How many language courses are taught in the college?
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4. Where should you register for the accounting courses?
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5. Where should the night courses assemble for the biology courses?
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