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ew minutes, and then consider the following: (1) Are there any unanswered questions about the meaning of the English text? If so, they should go back and skim read and/or read specific sections again. (2) Have they failed to recognize any assumption? (3) Have they understood the section of the English text related? (4) Have they made connections between the English text and other English materials they have read? (5) What’s their opinion on the conclusion of the English book? The questions above can help college students to work out what an English essay or story means to them. And the answers are also important here because a piece of English material never means precisely the same thing for every reader. The reader shapes his own comprehension by joining what he knows and what the author tells him and becomes a unique reader. 4. Ways of reading English texts 4.1 Skim reading & Scanning reading What is skimming? Skimming is a reading technique that can help one to: (1) read more quickly (2) decide if the English text is interesting and whether the reader should read it in more details. When college students should use skimming? This is the strategy that college students employ when they want to obtain a quick overview of a English text. “Skimming requires that the readers selectively omit some parts of the reading material. When readers skim, they read to get the main idea and a few, but not all of the details of an article or story.”[9] The term skimming is often confused with scanning. “Remember that skimming is used to obtain the gist (the overall sense) of a piece of text. Scanning is a reading skill to find a particular point of information quickly in a text. It is very useful for the readers to scan the text for particular bits of information they are searching for.”[10] E.g. Use skimming to get the gist of a page of an English textbook to decide whether it is useful and should therefore be read more slowly and in more detail. E.g. Use scanning to find a particular number in a telephone directory. Scanning is used to obtain specific information from a piece of English text. Sometimes the college students can use both reading methods. They can skim a piece of English text to find out something interesting; they may wish to use scanning techniques to locate specific information. When the college students use skim reading method, they shouldn’t read the whole text word-for-word. The college students should use as many clues as possible to get some background information: eg pictures or images related to the topic; an eye-catching title, etc. With the eyes skim over the surface of the text, the college students must try their best to find out any clues that can help them to understand the main idea of the text, and then look out some key words. The strategies always employ when they want to obtain a quick overview of an English text can be listed below: (1) reading the title, subtitle and subheading to find out what the English text is about. (2) reading the first and last sentence of each paragraph. (3) looking the illustration that may give the reader further information about the topic. (4) skimming over the English text to take in key words. (5) using the marker pen to mark out any items that the reader wants to re-read, or refer to later. Take reading English magazines and English newspapers for example. When reading an English newspaper,