SPEAKING JOURNAL

IMPROVING READING SKILLS THROUGH SKIMMING AND SCANNING TECHNIQUES AT PUBLIC SCHOOL : ACTION RESEARCH

By :

Sindy Díaz

Juan Carlos Laguado

INTRODUCTION

English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers appreciate the value of developing their students‟ receptive skills. Mastering these skills enables learners to achieve a successful learning process. According to The Common European Framework (CEF), receptive skills involve listening and reading competences; receptive activities include silent reading and following the media. They are also of importance in many forms of learning (understanding course content, consulting textbooks, works of reference and documents).

Some studies have shown the effectiveness of the skimming technique to improve reading (Rahmawati, 2008; Agudelo et al, 2006) . Other studies have focused on the use of scanning techniques to achieve better results in reading comprehension (Maxwell, 1978). On the other hand Maxwell (1969) conducted a study making use of the two techniques and the results revealed that students prefer to scan for details rather than skim for main ideas and many students are unable to skim for main ideas. Taking into account the previous theory, this study aimed at improving reading comprehension skills through skimming and scanning techniques. Likewise the grand tour question that guided this research was: how does the use of skimming and scanning techniques improve the reading skill of students at a public school?

SKIMMING AND SCANNING

            Maxwell (1969) defines skimming as getting the main idea or gist of a selection quickly in a written text where the students develop powers of inference through systematic practice which encourages them to anticipate the content of a text. According to Maxwell (1970) scanning, which is defined as the ability to locate specific facts and details quickly, is regarded as a desirable reading skill and is taught in most developmental reading courses.

With this technique, the students look for specific information within a text such as dates, names, places, among others.

METHODOLOGY

Ø  Design/ Instrument : Observation and interview

Ø  Method : Quantitative

Ø  Population : Students of Public School at Pamploma Colombia

Ø  Sample : 7^th grade students between 9 and 10 years old

In this research, the researcher used classroom observations because through them we were able to extract real data from real situations and by using quantitative method. This research project developed at a public school in Pamploma, Colombia. The sample worked were 7^th grade students between 9 and 10 years old organized into two groups, one with thirty-three students and the other one with thirty-four students.

RESEARCH FINDINGS

This section presents findings about the improvement in reading skills through skimming and scanning techniques. It is important to state that our goal in this action research was to give answers to the questions that guided this research especially to the grand tour question although it was a question that involved several aspects.

After analyzing the data gathered though the observations and the interviews, the following categories emerged:

1.      These techniques help to change students’ perceptions when reading

The implementation of this action research helped students change their beliefs and perceptions about reading and transform their reading practice for the better. It is important to remark that their insights turned out to be p ositive related to reading and skimming/ scanning techniques.

We observed that when the participants had to do reading exercises they did not like to do them, but after the implementation of these techniques the participants seemed to like it, since the students‟ participation in the classes was constant. It seems that the participants realized that the techniques were useful to answer questions from texts.

Likewise, through the interview we confirmed what we had observed since the participants answered that the techniques had been useful in several aspects within their learning process.

2.      Motivation increases the effectiveness of skimming and scanning techniques

Grellet (1981) stated that “Motivation is of great importance when readingpartly, because most of what we usually read is what we want to read, but also, because being motivated means that we start reading the text preparing to find a number of things in it, expecting to find answers to a number of questions and specific information or ideas we are interested in”.

The way of motivating the participants was through the texts they read since they were short, illustrated and the topics caught the students‟ attention:

When we started carrying out this project, one of our goals was to motivate the participants to use these techniques all the time since we knew that by doing it, students could get interested in reading texts.

3.      Students Improvement through Reading Comprehension Techniques

 the process, the researcher teachers focused on improving reading skills through skimming and scanning techniques, students carried out different activities about what they read, activities such as answering questions, circling the verbs, highlighting the words that were repeated in the texts, filling the gaps, and completing charts. During the classes, we noticed that the use of both techniques was important in enhancing the reading comprehension of the participants since the results obtained after the implementation of this project were significant. Besides, they obtained good results in the tests they took, which contained texts where they had to read using skimming and scanning techniques.

CONCLUSION

With regards the data gathered, it was concluded that the use of skimming and scanning techniques contributed to enhancing reading comprehension since after having worked with these techniques the researchers were able to verify that the participants improved their reading skills.

The motivation was essential since it helped to change the students‟ perceptions towards reading in English.

These findings seem to suggest that the participants preferred to use the skimming technique to the scanning one. It was observed that the students interacted more when working with the skimming technique, which did not occur when using the scanning one since some of the participants thought that the scanning activities were more complex and longer, making them lose interest.

Nevertheless, another relevant result was the combination of the two techniques since the skimming one was useful to find general information in a text quickly. In this technique the participants did not need to know the meaning of every single word, they just inferred the meaning by context taking into account the heading, subheadings and pictures in the text. However, we considered that the use of this technique was not enough to achieve the established goal for this project since there are longer texts that required more comprehension. For that reason, we decided to use the scanning technique which allowed the participants to find specific information in a long text.

REFERENCES

Calderon Guerrero and Carvajal (2007)“How to Improve Sixth Graders’ Reading Comprehension through the Skimming Technique”.. PROFILE Journal Vol 8, pages 25-39

Brown, H D (2001) Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Longman.

Common European Framework (CEF).(n.d.). Retrieved April, 7th 2012, from:

http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Framework_EN.pdf

Creswell, J. W. (2002). Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating

quantitative and qualitative research. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Person.

Creswell, J. W. (2005). Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating

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Maxwell (1972) “Skimming And Scanning Improvement: The Needs, Assumptions And Knowledge Base Journal of Reading Behavior", Vol. 5, No. 1 Retrieved April6th 2012, from: http://jlr.sagepub.com/content/5/1/47.full.pdf+html

Maxwell (1978) “Learning Style and Other Correlates Of Performance On A Scanning Experiment”. Journal of Literacy Research, vol. 10 , p.49-55Retrieved April 6th 2012, from: http://jlr.sagepub.com/content/10/1/49

Mighty students.“The Importance and Benefits of Conducting Research”.Retrieved

April 6th 2012, from:http://www.mightystudents.com/essay/Importance.Benefits.Conducting.37651

PoweII, E. (2003). Analyzing Qualitative Data. Retrieved April 7th 2012 from:

http://Ieamingstore . uwex.edu/assets/pdfs/g3658-12.pdf

Rahmawati(2008) “Six Strategies To Improve Reading Comprehension Action Research Of The Senior High School Students At The Indonesian School Of Bangkok” Retrieved April 7th 2012 from:

http://litu.tu.ac.th/2012/images/litu/Research/student/2550/Agustinah_4921032183

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