Semi Skimmed Reading - Reading and approaching unseen texts

For years, skim reading has been a thing. I have seen it used and referred to time and time again. Yet, I think it is the single most damaging skill in English. Ok, I will dial down the drama. Right, it is a dangerous thing when looking at how students read in lessons. Skim reading is quick, superficial and answer focused, but isn’t insightful, perceptive and clever. The problem we have is that in schools the default reading strategy is skim reading. It is the go to. The first step. The emergency button when reading exam papers.

The English exams are all unseen text exams. Even the literature exams are unseen texts. You don’t know what you are going to be reading about regardless if you have read the text. There’s a whole surprise element about things. Gotcha. You didn’t think it would be that?  Because everything is unseen, the way students read the text is so important and here is the problem. English places more emphasis on the text / sources than the questions. Yet, most subjects have a greater emphasis on the question than sources. That’s why students read the question and look for the answer. The default across exams is this process. Look at the question and then look at the source. This is where skimming and scanning comes in. Look at the question and then hunt for the answer. This is where English is far more nuanced and complex. 

English is like painting a picture rather than fox hunting. Yes, you can set the hounds off to look for an answer, but during that process they will have missed lots of interesting and relevant things because they only focused on the scent of one thing. The scent usually is what they are expecting to happen. A painting is a culmination of aspects combined to make the whole. The whole is always more important than the single parts.  

Time and time again I see students fall into this process. Read the question and then search for the answer. If we look across whole cohorts, we see this permeates across all aspects of English. It’s largely why students rarely plan. The fox hunt approach. Quick and fast before you lose the scent. That’s why students waffle with literature responses. They found a scent of something so they need to write it down before they lose it. That’s why students waffle in transactional writing. I better get the scent of an idea down before it fades. Again and again, they do this. 

Texts should be the driving force for understanding and not the question. The questions are only there to see that they really, really understand the text. It is not to show that they really, really understand the question. We’ve got to the point where the question has such a damaging impact on understanding. Students automatically focus on the question because of the school’s collective emphasis on the question first then checking the source for the answer, but we are supporting it even more by putting all the emphasis on the questions and supporting this fox hunting approach to reading. If a student knows the text well, then there isn't that much of a need to spend time looking at how to write the question. Largely, the teaching related to answering the question is making sure their writing emulates a person understanding the text. Teaching exam preparation is largely teaching students visual markers for an examiner to think ‘cor this student knows their stuff’. 

Hiding the questions is key to addressing the problem. Students must ensure they understand the text first, before they even think of the questions. Take GCSE English Language Paper 1. We always look at the text in isolation. No questions. No skimming and scanning. The starting point is reading the text. It isn’t searching for techniques. It isn’t finding every clever thing we can. It isn’t even anything fancy. Read it and make sure we understand it.  

I follow this structure for approaching all texts on the language paper. But, here, I am going to specify Paper 1. 

Step 1 - The letter box - The overview 

Orientating the text is a tricky aspect. It is key for getting the overall text’s meaning. The sooner students understand the context of the story the better. We’ve all read novels where it has taken us three pages to work out an elf’s perspective we are seeing things from  and not the tree’s perspective. Oh, and everyone is dead.

#Who is the protagonist? Who is going on an emotional / physical / spiritual journey? 

#What is the conflict? What is going to cause the drama in the extract? 

#What is the genre of the story? What are the rules and things I’d expect to see with this genre? 

Students look for these markers to build a rough picture of the story. Rosabel. She is poor. Realism. Then, there might be some inferences we can make based on the overview. It always helps to get them to think before they read the extract.   

Step 2 - Read and summarise 

Then, simply I get students to read the text one paragraph at a time. For each paragraph, they come up with a title. This then helps solidify the focus. 

Interestingly, it takes some time to get students to be good at this, because they try to overcomplicate things. They want to sound good from the start. Giving them confidence to say that the section is about the bus is key. This is still orientating around the story. 

Usually, at this stage, students in the past have highlighted forty techniques. The sad thing is that students only really need about four or five good ones. But, like skim reading, how students engage with reading has become warped. We need students to focus on understanding first and that’s what isn’t always happening. 

Step 3 - Track the journey 

Finally, we spend time pulling it all together. I get students to simply draw a table. An eye. A heart. A lightbulb. Then, we track the start / middle / end. 

What does the writer focus on in the start / middle / end? 

What are we supposed to feel at the start / middle / end? 

What ideas are being explored in the text? 

Feelings can be quite a tricky thing to articulate, so often we start with positive / negative and then attach specific emotion after that. Students find it much easier to go negative and then anxious rather than trying to find a word that matches the effect. 

Once students have spotted the focus and the emotions they can then start thinking about what is really going on in the extract. What are the big ideas? We tend to watch numerous short animated films to get them into the habit of exploring these three things. Focus. Feelings. Ideas. Time spent thinking about them now saves time later. 

Now, we get to the questions. They’ve spent about ten minutes on the extract. But, by then, they understand the subtext and explore what the writing is trying to show and the ideas in the text. Ready to think about the question. When we get to this stage, students have a concrete set of ideas to work with, so when they look at Q2 and talk about techniques they can link to ideas and feelings already thought of. They don’t have to hunt foxes. They are starting from a position of confidence. I have something to work with and I can build on it. 

Exams are pretty stressful and students want to do well, but sometimes the approaches they use, and we teach, are counterproductive and far damaging. Skim reading and focusing on the question first are two things I think we need to address in lessons and help students to avoid. These two elements warp the processes in exams to the point that they are damaging. A focus on skim reading teaches students that there are quick and easy answers to find. A focus on the question teaches students that the reading of the source isn’t important. A student will do well if they read the unseen extracts slowly and in a structured way. 

We need to work harder to show students that English deals with things differently than other subjects.The default might be to skim read and look at the question first in other subjects, but that is the worst thing to do for us.

Thanks for reading, 

Xris