Critical reading
Micro-skills
Here are some of the micro-skills involved in reading. The reader has to:
• decipher the script. In an alphabetic system or a syllabary, this means establishing a relationship between sounds and symbols. In a pictograph system, it means associating the meaning of the words with written symbols.
• recognize vocabulary.
• pick out key words, such as those identifying topics and main ideas.
• figure out the meaning of the words, including unfamiliar vocabulary, from the (written) context.
• recognize grammatical word classes: noun, adjective, etc.
• detect sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, prepositions, etc.
• recognize basic syntactic patterns.
• reconstruct and infer situations, goals and participants.
• use both knowledge of the world and lexical and grammatical cohesive devices to make the foregoing inferences, predict outcomes, and infer links and connections among the parts of the text.
• get the main point or the most important information.
• distinguish the main idea from supporting details.
• adjust reading strategies to different reading purposes, such as skimming for main ideas or studying in-depth.
Ataei (2000) considers reading as the most important skill with regard to the needs of Iranian EAP students and their future profession in academic contexts. He argues that the teaching of reading skills via tasks successfully integrates EAP readers’ needs for extensive and intensive reading.
Jordan (1997, p.143) claims that although reading for academic purposes is a multifaceted skill, whenever students read, it is purpose-specific. Thus students are concerned with content comprehension through different kinds of reading skills and micro-skills. Moreover
Maker & Lenier (1986) Critical reading enables to size up the author’s arguments and to evaluate how well he supports them. A reader must think beyond what is stated and decide what the author is
trying to imply.