There are a handful of reading and language skills that are foundational for success in SAT, ACT and in life. These skills not only enhance comprehension and retention but also foster critical thinking and aid people in powering through passages and the written word. These skills are what make the best readers, oftentimes CEOs and world leaders, able to read and digest massive amounts of information without losing focus or understanding.
The foundations of reading comprehension and fluency are vocabulary and grammar which serve as cornerstones for the 5 skills listed below: Active Reading, Analyzing Arguments, Critical Thinking, Time Management and Understanding Morphemes.
Active reading involves engaging with the text through questioning, summarizing, and annotating to enhance comprehension and retention.
Active reading is a crucial skill because it promotes deeper understanding, critical thinking, and better retention of information, which supports effective learning and application of new concepts.
One technique that will help students comprehend and retain information is called gisting or the practice of summarizing ideas when reading.
To gist,
Read over about a paragraph of information
Summarize the information of one paragraph in one sentence.
Continue this for an entire article to create an effective summary of a passage. As students get comfortable with doing this on paper eventually it becomes easier to do automatically allowing students to more easily comprehend and digest what they are reading.
Analyzing arguments involves evaluating claims, evidence, and reasoning to determine validity and soundness. While it’s a skill that you probably practice subconsciously, actively improving your affinity for it has astounding benefits.
Analyzing arguments helps develop critical thinking skills, identify logical fallacies, and improves the ability to construct and deconstruct arguments, which supports better understanding of complex ideas.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is the process of analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information to make reasoned judgments. Critical thinking is a bit more complicated than other skills, since its a combination of many skills.
The best way we recommend for a person to enhance their critical thinking skills is to ask questions as they are reading. This means to look at reading as a conversation as opposed to a monologue by an author.
This works well with active reading as it makes people participants in their reading experience and challenges them to critically think about the arguments that authors are making.
Critical thinking is highly beneficial because it fosters clear and rational thought, effective problem-solving, and informed decision-making, which are essential for mastering new concepts and navigating complex information.
Time Management
Effectively managing your time involves reading through any material with the goal of maximizing efficiency. It’s important for reading new material because it allows you to allocate sufficient time for comprehension, review, and reflection, ensuring that you understand and retain the information efficiently without feeling overwhelmed.
Two techniques we recommend for time management while reading is: knowing where the most important information is and using a technique called skimming.
The first tip we have for readers is to focus on where the most important information is on the first pass through of a text. Oftentimes the most important information or summaries of a text are put at the beginning or the end. Important information is also put as headlines throughout articles or passages. For example, with books there is generally a lot of important information that can be taken from the organization of the table of contents or the summary at the back of the book. Oftentimes these serve as gists themselves for important topics in books or passages.
The second tip we have for people to manage their time better while reading is to practice skimming paragraphs on the first passthrough and practice speed reading by using a pointer or tracker to guide their reading and focus their attention while also maintaining a consistent pace of reading. Skimming is the act of not focusing on reading a text word-for-word, but instead gliding one’s attention across a page to get a general idea or gist of what is going on. At first is may be hard to understand a text but when combined with other skills such as gisting and vocab fluency, this technique can greatly enhance someone’s reading efficiency.
Learning Morphemes (Latin/Greek Roots and Stems)
Morphemes are defined as the most basic unit of meaning in a language. In the English language the cultures that most words in higher education are taken from is most often Latin and Greek stems, roots, prefixes and suffixes. Understanding Latin and Greek roots and stems is essential for any person, as it allows them to make inferences about words that they have never heard of before.
It’s important for reading new material because it helps you quickly decode and understand unfamiliar words, enhancing your comprehension and enabling you to grasp the meaning of complex texts more easily.
2023 Inlighten. All Rights Reserved