• Ask the learner to synthesize the material read.
  What is the main idea of this? What do you think about this story?

You may find the text, Teaching Reading to Adults: A Balanced Approach ³ by Pat Campbell useful with high intermediate or advanced learners who have difficulty either decoding or comprehending reading passages.

In Teaching Reading to Adults: A Balanced Approach, Pat Campbell provides basic tools to assist you in determining learner difficulties in reading. She also suggests different teaching strategies that you can use if your learner has difficulty gaining specific information from the text (an inability to answer text-based questions) or cannot synthesize or evaluate information from the text (an inability to answer questions not literally answered in the text).

C: Other Reading Strategies: Skimming and Scanning

While teaching for comprehension is important, it is also valuable to teach other types of reading skills as well. Sometimes, it is not necessary to gain a thorough understanding of what one reads. For example, when you read the newspaper, do you read it cover to cover, word for word?

If you are interested in getting the main idea of what an article is about, you will need to look over the text very quickly. Perhaps you will read only the title, the introduction, the conclusion and any bold or bulleted points. While this is not enough information to fully understand the text, doing this will give you enough information to determine the main idea and whether or not you are interested in reading the entire document.

This type of reading is referred to as skimming and is a useful skill for learners to develop if they are interested in returning to school or planning to work in an environment where they are required to do a lot of reading and may have to glean information from numerous sources.

Scanning, a strategy where you run your eyes quickly over the text until you find the specific information you were seeking, is also useful for learners to develop. Generally, this skill is used to find small pieces of information in a large source like a phone book or the want ads.

The way you structure the presentation will differ depending upon the skill(s) that you want to develop. Generally, the development of skimming and scanning skills require that the tutor develop questions that will prompt learners to find specific information quickly or supply the main idea of a passage in a short period of time.

³ Pat Campbell, Teaching Reading to Adults: A Balanced Approach (Edmonton, Alberta: Grassroots Press, 2003.)