Reading Comprehension & Précis

Reading Comprehension and Precis

This is about reading and understanding a written text in order to extract the required information from this text as effectively as possible. Précis refers to creating concise and brief summaries of a written text. The reading material can be novels, short stories, poems or any literary passage. There are extensive and intensive readings in this module. In extensive reading, you read long texts. In intensive reading, you read short texts. You will have to learn and use a few effective strategies, especially skimming and scanning. Learning these strategies helps to expand your vocabulary repertoire quickly.

General Tips: 

1. Be an active reader and involve yourself with the material you're reading.

2. Underline new words and check their meaning in a dictionary.

3. Take notes of the important ideas in the passage

4. Read the questions before reading the passage.

5. Understand each question in order to provide correct answers.

6. Formulate answers to direct questions using your own words.

7. With multiple-choice questions, narrow down your choices by crossing out inappropriate choices and focus on the remaining possibilities.

The two reading strategies you will be mostly using in your academic journey are scanning and skimming.

---> Scanning: This is similar to looking for a phone number in a directory. It is used when you need to get a specific piece of information from the text like numbers, dates or facts related to your question. When applying this skill, you scan the text quickly in search of what you want, ignoring irrelevant sections and details. Remember you scanning a text is pushed by the question you have in mind.

---> Skimming: This strategy is used when you want to get the general idea and the main point of a passage without focusing on every detail. Your reading is quick, and your attention is directed towards title, headings, sub-titles, introducing and concluding sentences. The objective here is to have a general understanding of the whole text. 

Check Your Understanding