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:

Reading Skill Practice: Summarizing and Finding the Main Idea

Finding the main idea in what you read takes practice. You have to learn to tell the difference between main idea statements and detail statements. You often have to recognize a summary (a brief statement of what the reading is mainly about) or a paraphrase (a statement that says the same thing, but with different words). You also have to learn to group details into categories by identifying what they have in common. Seeing what statements have in common helps you to identify the main idea of what you are reading, or to summarize it with different words..

My suggestion: Click on the link below to learn how to summarize and how to tell the difference between the main idea and the details that support the main idea.

LINK: Finding the Main Idea and Summarizing

Practice finding topic sentences in paragraphs

Reading and writing English both require you to recognize the main idea of a paragraph. Usually a topic sentence tells what the paragraph is about. The other sentences show detailed evidence for whatever the topic sentence says is true. The sentences that provide details are called supporting sentences.

My suggestion: Click on the link below to practice finding the topic sentence in a paragraph.

LINK: Find the topic sentence

How Do You Find the Main Idea?

Below is a link to a college reading center website. It outlines helpful steps for finding the main idea of a reading selection. There is a section on finding the main idea when it is stated directly, when it is contained in a "reversal" statement, and when it is not stated directly, but implied.

My suggestion: Click on the link below. Read the first page (copied below the link), which gives some general instructions for how to find the topic and the main idea of a reading selection. Then continue reading about three different ways the main idea may be found:
1) directly stated main idea, 2) reversal transitions, and 3) implied main idea.

LINK: How to Find the Main Idea of a Paragraph