Understanding Different Reading Types and Their Purposes
Understanding the Different Types of Reading
Criteria for Classifying Types of Reading
Why do different types of reading exist? What are the reasons? How are these reading types taught?
Different types of reading exist because reading is not a homogeneous activity with a single set of skills. Instead, it involves a diverse set of skills that are used in different ways depending on the situation. We read differently depending on the text we encounter. A primary distinction is made based on the objectives of comprehension and speed:
By Understanding
- Extensive Reading: Done for pleasure or general interest, such as reading a novel.
- Intensive Reading: Done to obtain specific information from a text, such as reading a letter.
- Fast Reading: Done to quickly gather information from a text, such as skimming a book or glancing at a newspaper.
- Involuntary Reading: Reading advertisements that we encounter in our daily lives, such as on the streets or on TV.
By Speed
A second criterion focuses on the effectiveness of reading in terms of comprehension and speed:
- Integral Reading: This involves reading the entire text.
- Reflexive Reading: This is a slower type of reading that involves a thorough understanding and careful analysis of the text. It typically has a speed below 250 words per minute (wpm) and achieves more than 80% comprehension. This is often used when studying.
- Medium Reading: This is the most common type of reading, with a comprehension rate of 50-70% and a speed of 250-300 wpm. We use this type of reading for leisure, at work, and at home.
- Selective Reading: This involves choosing parts of the text that contain information relevant to the reader’s objectives. It utilizes complementary strategies for searching specific information. For example, reading a newspaper.
- Skimming: This involves looking over a text superficially to form an initial global idea, which can then direct attention to specific parts. It answers questions like: What is this text about? Is it long? Is it dense?
- Scanning: This involves examining a text in detail to find specific information and details that are of interest. It answers questions like: How old was the victim? Where did it happen?
By Type of Education
A third criterion is the type of education, which can be intensive or extensive. A final distinction, common in second language teaching, is between intensive reading (analysis of texts) and extensive reading (reading books for each subject). The differences between them are:
- Extensive Reading: Involves shorter texts, is conducted in a classroom setting, emphasizes the training of micro-skills, focuses on different types of understanding, and is often included in textbooks.
- Intensive Reading: Involves longer texts, encourages more natural reading outside the classroom, emphasizes building skills and the enjoyment of reading, and is related to comprehensive class libraries, neighborhood libraries, etc.
Classes of Readers
Readers Who Understand the Text
- They can summarize a hierarchical text by highlighting the most important ideas and distinguishing the relationships between them.
- They synthesize information according to its importance in the text and understand how it has been judged by the author, even if they are personally interested in a different selection.
Readers with Difficulty Understanding
- They accumulate information like a list.
- They suppress what seems redundant and copy the rest without a specific guide.
- They select words influenced by the information’s position in the text or subjectively according to their interests.
In short, skilled readers understand the text with more depth: they identify the relative importance of each piece of information, deliver textual and hierarchical structures, distinguish between what is important to the author and what is important to themselves, and so on. In contrast, learners are often unable to perform all these tasks and end up processing the information in a more linear and superficial way, focusing on details and surface-level aspects.