Dear Students, in continuing the chapter on Reading Comprehension we take up a very important

module of Active Reading.

What do good readers do? They form hypotheses about the author’s purpose for writing. What

does this mean? It means that when the person is reading he is also thinking about why the author

has written this piece. They make predictions on the bases of illustrations, charts and subheadings.

They consider what they already know about the topic or the genre. They set purposes for reading

and establish goals to help them pace their reading. They build a repertoire of useful strategies.

Sort relevant and irrelevant information, which means that they tend to organise data to find the

gist or the main idea. Now how do good readers do this, with a set of good reading skills. First is the

quick view one, making predictions, thinking about what the text will be about after taking just a

glance at it. Anticipation, the ability to activate prior knowledge in order to help the text become

comprehensible. They infer, they understand a certain aspect of the text based on the meaning of

the rest of the information. In fact it is necessary to use ideas stated in the text plus your own

personal experience. Next are context clues.