Rather, it’s a preparatory stage, a threshold. Reading for gist is not an end in itself, as Scott Thornbury argues in his insightful discussion on this matter. Nevertheless, teachers of English can help learners improve their abilities in these areas. We might therefore expect the skills to be transferable ones – and indeed they are. Skimming and scanning are reading skills most learners use extensively in their mother tongue. We do this when, for example, we consult a bus timetable for a specific time or destination. Scanning is our quest for more specific information, such as numbers, names or other easily identifiable data within a text. Reading for gist is all about getting the ideas of the text by skimming it rapidly and ignoring the grammatical words.Īnother reading skill often mentioned alongside skimming is scanning. We also look for visuals or any other discrete discourse features to help us make informed predictions.Īs we begin skimming a text, we focus on the content words – the nouns, verbs and adjectives – rather the grammatical words (it, the, on, etc.,) that provide structure rather than meaning. A quick glance at the arrangement – densely written columns, for example – can tell us we're looking at a newspaper article, even when it's been reproduced in an exam paper. This is also known as skimming.Ī text can provide readers with lots of clues that help readers quickly establish what it's about. When taking a quick look at a written text to establish its genre and the main message its writer means to get across, we're reading for gist. Gist is the overall meaning, the core idea, of a spoken or written discourse. Why is the ability to read for gist important for many learners of English and how can they develop this skill? Eleni Pappa, a British Council teacher in Greece, provides the answers.
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