What are the skills of reading?

Basically, reading is about getting the meaning out of the printed page, sign or screen. It’s made up of a large number of skills and pieces of knowledge.

Four critical things you need to be able to do are:

• recognise a large number of words at a glance
• work out unfamiliar words by guessing them from the context
• work out words by decoding them from the letter sounds
• achieve the speed that you need to capture the meaning — if you go too slowly you lose track of what you are reading.
  

Other important reading skills include:

• scanning — flicking through to find something you are looking for
• skimming — getting the gist of something by glancing through it quickly
• using the alphabet to look things up.