Reading Skills Practice: Strategies for Better Reading

Reading tests have a time limit. They try to find out whether you read English well enough to quickly understand the meaning, of what you read. We call this skill reading comprehension (comprehension means understanding). To read well, you have to improve your vocabulary, but you also have to work on other reading skills: inferring, predicting, and identifying the main idea.

If you read well enough to understand what the author intends, you should be able to draw conclusions about what you are reading, or to predict what will probably happen next. Sometimes we call this skill "reading between the lines," or inference. To infer means to use what the author directly says to conclude or predict something that he author doesn't actually state.

My suggestion: Click on the link below to practice inferring, predicting, and identifying the main idea.

LINK: Strategies for Better Reading: Understanding, Predicting, Inferring 

Here is a sample question from this activity:

Making Inferences

Making inferences is an important reading skill. An inference is a guess you make based on what is stated and on logic. An inference isn't something that is stated directly in what you read. You have to make a logical guess or conclusion that isn't stated based on information that is stated in what you read. Here's an example from the quiz below:

     Don't sneeze when someone is cutting your hair. (Why would someone give this advice?)

My suggestion: Click on the link below to take a quick quiz on making inferences based on advice given by children. You have to infer the reason for the advice.

LINK: Quiz on Making Inferences