Reading Skills: Identify the Text

Identify the Text | Look Over the Entire Reading | Reference Words | Important/Difficult Concepts

Good readers take chances when they read by filling in gaps of meaning. They approach the text in an interactive manner. When they come across words they don’t understand, good readers try to figure out those words from the meaning of surrounding words.

Keep in mind that academic vocabulary can cause a great deal of difficulty for many learners of English since its vocabulary is specialized and essentially encountered in texts and not in regular speech. While you are reading, you do not have to look up every word and you don’t have to take wild guesses. You can look at clues in the reading to help you understand a passage. Before you read a text, if you familiarize yourself with the writer’s style, which includes the type of vocabulary he uses and the topic that the essay will address, the first read of the essay will be less daunting. This is important since you’ll be reading difficult passages. While it’s important to look up words you don’t know, you should also attempt to take chances and fill in the gaps of meaning in a passage as you read.

Remember that a good reader is patient and thorough.

Identify the text: Is it fact or fiction?

Is it an essay? If so, the author is the speaker. Typically, the author will be presenting some kind of argument. He or she will present views about an issue. Keep in mind that in more complex texts, the argument will be subtler than a simple “for” or “against” point of view.

Is it fiction ? If so,you cannot take for granted that the speaker is the author. The speaker in the text is typically a character, and it is important that you understand who that speaker is from the clues in the text. The voice of the speaker in fiction is a “persona,” a kind of mask that the author uses to develop his story.

Is it autobiographical? If so, the speaker is the author writing about an issue that relates to some aspect of his or her life.

Examples of fiction, autobiography, and essays:
(Taken from Language & Landscapes: English for American Academic Discourse , Lynch, Rottweiler, and Dutt)

Fiction: Mukherjee, p. 86, paragraph 37:

Tara wondered what David would do if he ever came to India. He was not like her. Would he sling his camera like other Americans and photograph beggars in Shambazar, squatters in Tollygunge, prostitutes in Free School Street, would he try to capture in color the pain of Calcutta? She thought he would pass over the obvious. Instead he would analyze her life and her friends in the lens of his Minolta. He would group the families carefully, Mummy in new cotton sari on cane chair, Daddy in "bush coat" beside her, she herself on a morah in dead center, with servants, maids, and chauffeur in the background smiling fixedly at the camera. He would go with her to the Calcutta Club, take pictures of doctors and lawyers playing canasta. He would explode his flash bulbs at Pronob's parties, and regret he did not own a tape recorder. No, she feared, he was wiser than she cared to admit to herself. Perhaps he would not do these things either. He would land unannounced at Howrah Station and say to the coolie wearing a number, I'd like to see the real India. None of this, of course, helped her relations with Reena.

Autobiography: Angelou, p. 41, paragraph 10

On our way home one evening, Miss Glory told me that Mrs. Cullinan couldn't have children. She said that she was too delicate-boned. It was hard to imagine bones at all under those layers of fat. Miss Glory went on to say that the doctor had taken out all her lady organs. I reasoned that a pig's organs included the lungs, heart, and liver, so if Mrs. Cullinan was walking around without those essentials, it explained why she drank alcohol out of unmarked bottles. She was keeping herself embalmed.

Essay: Takai, p. 165, paragraph 6

Indeed, more than ever before, as we approach the time when whites become a minority, many of us are perplexed about our national identity and our future as one people. This uncertainty has provoked Allan Bloom to reaffirm the preeminence of Western Civilization. Author of The Closing of the American Mind, he has emerged as a leader of an intellectual backlash against cultural diversity. In his view, students entering the university are "uncivilized," and the university has the responsibility to "civilize" them. Bloom claims he knows that their "hungers" are and "what they can digest." Eating is one of his favorite metaphors. Nothing the "large black presence" in major universities, he laments the "one failure" in race relations—black students have proven to be "indigestible." They do not "melt as have all other groups." The problem, he contends, is that "blacks have become blacks": they have become "ethnic." This separatism has been reinforced by an academic permissiveness that has befouled the curriculum with "Black Studies" along with "Learn Another Culture." The only solution, Bloom insists, is "the good old Great Books approach."

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