As a university student, you aren’t just reading for main ideas and to pass exams only, you’re reading to write research papers or prepare for seminars. Therefore, mastering Skimming and Scanning is your “survival kit” to manage this workload efficiently.
Skimming, also known as gist reading, involves reading quickly to gain a general understanding of a text, such as briefly glancing at an old document to decide if it should be deleted.
How to skim effectively:
- Read the “power stations”: Focus on the title, the introduction, and the conclusion where normally you can find the main ideas of the whole passage.
- The first-sentence rule: In academic writing, the first sentence of a paragraph (often the topic sentence) usually contains the main claim. Read the first sentence of every paragraph and you may skip the rest.
- Notice the visuals: Glance at subheadings, bolded words, charts, and captions. These are “signposts” given by the author.
- Ignore the details: If you see a long list of dates, names, or complex statistics, jump over them. You only need the concept right now.
- Pay attention to signpost language. When you scan and see However, Nevertheless, or Conversely, you know the author is about to change direction. Words like Thus, Consequently, or Hence indicate the “answer” or the conclusion of an argument. First, second…outline the structure of the section for you.
Scanning is the very quick processing of text to locate a specific detail, such as looking for the price of a product in an advertisement, a date, a definition, a name, or a statistic.
How to scan effectively:
- Know what you are looking for: Before reading, say the keyword out loud or visualize it, for example, whether you need a “percentage,” look only for the % symbol or numbers; or If you are looking for a name, a country (like Vietnam), or a specific theory, then only look for Capital Letters.
- Track your read: Use your pen or finger as a guide to keep your eyes moving fast. It prevents you from falling back into “slow reading” mode.
As a Vietnamese student learning your majors in English, you may face the double burden of learning the content (e.g., Economics or IT) while processing the language. Here are some suggestions:
- Build your technical vocabulary: Scanning becomes much faster once you recognize specialized terms (e.g., macroeconomics, sustainability, algorithm). When these words become “sight words,” they jump off the page at you.
- Don’t translate every word: A common mistake is stopping to look up every unknown word in a dictionary. Stop! If you are skimming, you don’t need to know every adjective. If the word isn’t the “target” of your scan, ignore it. And you don’t need to pronounce the word in your head to understand it.
- One commonly observed habit of Vietnamese learners is having a translation app (such as Google Translate) open constantly. This might kill your Skimming flow. You should look up a word if it appears many times in a page or you can’t understand the main content without it.
- You may try “color code” while scanning, using physical highlighters or digital tools. Color coding allows you to find information quickly without having to re-read entire texts. For example, you can use pink for definitions, yellow for dates.
Today, skimming and scanning are essential skills for online reading. Activities that require learners to quickly evaluate which internet search results are the most useful or to find specific information on non-linear websites rely heavily on these fast-reading strategies.
Reference
Watkins, P. (2018). Teaching and developing reading skills. In Cambridge University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009024716
