Reading Skills and Strategies

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  Recognizing the script of a language
  
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  Deducing the meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items
  
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  Understanding explicitly stated information
  
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  Understanding information when not explicitly stated
  
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  Understanding conceptual meaning
  
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  Understanding the communicative value (function) of sentences and utterances
  
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  Understanding relations within the sentence
  
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  Understanding relations between the parts of a text through lexical cohesion devices
  
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  Understanding cohesion between parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices
  
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  Interpreting text by going outside it
  
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  Recognizing indicators in discourse
  
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  Identifying the main point or important information in a piece of discourse
  
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  Distinguishing the main idea from supporting details
  
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  Extracting salient points to summarize (the text, an idea etc.)
  
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  Selective attraction of relevant points from a text
  
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  Basic reference skills
  
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  Skimming
  
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  Scanning to locate specifically required information
  
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  Transcoding information to diagrammatic display
  

Competent readers first take into consideration what they are going to read and then they choose the way of reading:

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  Skimming: quickly running one's eyes over a text to get the gist of it.
  
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  Scanning: quickly going through a text to find out a particular piece of information.
  
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  Extensive reading: reading longer texts, usually for one's own pleasure. This is a fluency activity, mainly involving global understanding.
  
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  Intensive reading: reading shorter texts, to extract specific information. This is more an accuracy activity involving reading for detail.
  

These different ways of reading are not mutually exclusive. For instance, one often skims through the passage to see what it its about before deciding whether it is worth scanning a particular paragraph for the information one is looking for.