One of the most effective ways to build your skills is to practice. The following steps also help outline what you might do to improve and further develop your reading skills. You might practice speed reading to improve your fluency or make notes each time you encounter unfamiliar vocabulary. There are a variety of ways you might improve your reading skills. Related: The Importance of Cognitive Ability in Your Career How to improve your reading skills By practicing your summarizing skills and remembering what you have read, you can further strengthen your reading comprehension. Comprehension is based on the retention of information. Reading comprehension is typically all about retaining what we read. Related: Making Inferences: How To Build This Critical Thinking Skill Retention Additionally, the ability to connect ideas and make inferences can help increase retention. Inferring happens when we read a text where the purpose and meaning of the text is not implicitly stated.
For instance, when reading an article about plastics in the oceans, you might make an inference that to reduce the amount of plastic waste you should recycle. When we make inferences, we are connecting information from texts to our own ideas and opinions that help us identify the meaning of what we read. Inference is also a key element of reading comprehension. Related: 7 Steps To Expand Your English Vocabulary (With Tips) Inference When you can quickly interpret new meanings and identify relationships between new vocabulary and familiar terms, you can increase your ability to make assumptions, form ideas and generally better understand the texts you read. The ability to decode or determine the meaning of new words can also influence your reading comprehension. For example, as a child becomes more fluent in their reading, they will be able to quickly find meaning and an understanding of what they read, which contributes to understanding the text. Fluency is what it sounds like to read, which can directly impact your ability to comprehend what you read. Fluency also focuses on your ability to decode new vocabulary quickly while reading.
First, it focuses on your ability to read clearly with flow. Related: Steps and Components of the Communication Process Fluencyįluency refers to a mix of different factors. Making the connection between a letter or group of letters the sounds they make and is a crucial step to “sounding out” or decoding words.
It relies on phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear individual sounds in words and connect those sounds to letters. Related: 7 Simple Strategies To Improve Reading ComprehensionĮssential skills needed for reading comprehension include: Decodingĭecoding is a skill that relies on your ability to sound out words you’ve heard but never seen written out. Several elements like fluency, the ability to decode unfamiliar vocabulary and using context clues from the reading to identify key features of a text can all be components of effective reading comprehension. Strong reading comprehension typically encompasses a variety of literacy skills needed to interpret and identify meanings within a text. Reading comprehension is simply the ability to understand what you read. Read more: Communication Skills: Definitions and Examples What is reading comprehension? Reading skills can also encompass several key aspects that work together to develop overall literacy skills, including comprehension, fluency, vocabulary and strategies that help readers interpret and find meaning in texts. Using reading skills in the workplace can also be important for ensuring effective written communication, which can result in less miscommunication or misunderstanding of expectations. Exceptional reading skills can be highly beneficial to assimilating and responding to written communications like emails, messages, letters and other written messages. Reading skills are abilities that pertain to a person's capacity to read, comprehend, interpret and decode written language and texts. In this article, we explore reading skills, the role reading comprehension plays in developing literacy skills and the steps you can take to improve your reading skill set. Literacy impacts so much of what we do that it can be a critical skill to possess, both in your personal life as well as within your career. Having strong reading abilities can enable you to interpret and find meaning in all that you read, and when you continuously improve these skills, you can develop your ability to communicate effectively through writing. Reading comprehension encompasses a variety of skills that can permeate all aspects of life. An illustration of a person reading a book about business, with charts and graphs seen in a callout.