HKCEE: Techniques for Reading Comprehension

The reading paper evaluates the proficiency level of candidates' reading skills. The exam tasks require candidates to read real-life related articles for general and specific information. It is wise to read for main ideas before getting into the details.

The following are techniques or strategies that will help readers to get an overall and specific meaning of the texts:

1. predicting the content
2. adopting a common theme
3. skimming for general ideas
4. scanning for specific information
5. identifying topic sentences
6. summarising a paragraph

Predicting the Content

Aways read the title very carefully to get a general idea about the passage. Use your common knowledge of the topic to predict the content of the passage. Ask yourself what genre, or text type, the text is adopting: fiction or non-fiction (flyer, newspaper, email, letter). If the text is a non-fiction, ask yourself the questions:

• What is the text about?
• Where does it come form?
• Who is the author?
• What position does the author hold when he expresses his opinion?
• How does the message convey to readers?

Adopting a Common Theme to reading

After getting a general idea about the content, you may now guess what are the possible theme you can attach to a topic area you're reading. Example of the themes can be:

• education
• tourism
• sports
• health and beauty
• interest clubs
• food and diet
• culture and festivals

Skimming for General Ideas

Before start reading a text in detail, always try to get a general idea of what the text is going to be about. This is called skimming – reading quickly certain parts of it:
· the first and last paragraphs of a text; and
· the first sentence of every paragraph

Scanning for Specific Information

You may not only want to get a general idea of a text, in some situations, they may need to locate specific information from the text quickly. You can do this by scanning.

Step for scanning

1. Look through the text quickly
2. Find relevant words / key words / phrases that help to locate the information. You will not read every word in the text.
3. Get the information

Identifying Topic Sentences

The main idea of a paragraph is usually captured or summarised in a “topic sentence”. Hence, two useful skills for understanding the main ideas of a paragraph are identifying topic sentences and summarising paragraphs.

General factual questions tend to be multiple-choice or matching questions, and they generally require the ability to

• choose from a list of the main ideas of a paragraph, or
• choose from a list of suitable summary statements for the paragraph.

Summarising a paragraph

To understand the main idea in a paragraph, it is necessary to summarise the paragraph in one simple sentence. This skill will always be used to answer the questions related to the main idea of a paragraph.