Lecture 1: Reading Skills (5-Nov-2013)

There are four types of skills involved in communication:

1. Reading
2. Writing
3. Listening
4. Speaking

We will discuss about "Reading Skills" in this lecture.

Reading Skills:

There are some factors that cause problems while you are reading and those factors can slow down your reading process.
Those problem-causing factors are:

1. If English is your secondary language: If you don't often speak English at home or at school or at work. And if you only use English language at very few occasions, then English language is your secondary language. And this fact can cause some problems while you will try reading some material that is written in English.
2. If there are some difficult/confusing words: While you are reading some context provided in English language, you may find some difficult or confusing words in that text. Those difficult words may confuse you and you may start thinking about them for a while. Hence, difficult words are also a reason to slow down your reading process.
3. If you are repeatedly reading the text in order to check your understanding (or to check up-to what extent you succeeded to get the idea of the text) then this habit also slows down your reading process.
4. Reading out aloud or under-breath: If you're reading out aloud or under-breath, then this may also cause disturbance in your speed of reading. Because reading out loud and reading under-breath, both cannot suite you at once, only one of them fits you.

6 Steps to overcome reading problems:

One can overcome the problems that vanish or oppose your reading skills. There are 6 steps which must be closely understood and adapted in order to get rid of reading problems. Those six steps are given below:

1. Feeling right about reading: There are four levels of this step which can be explained as follows.

• I like to read every type of material or books (of every subject) in order to get pleasure or for some work purposes (like collecting knowledge for writing etc) or to prepare examination or assignments.
• I like to read depending upon the subject to get some pleasure or for some work purposes or to prepare assignments/examination.
• I am not very keen to study, but I have to read some books or some material for study or work purposes.
• I totally dislike reading.

(Lecture is still incomplete, we will shortly update the complete lecture here)