THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

MUONG LAT HIGH SCHOOL

EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE

THE EFFECTS OF SKIMMING TECHNIQUE IN IMPROVING
GRADE 12 STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION
AT MUONG LAT HIGH SCHOOL

The author: Nguyễn Thị Thoa
Job position: Teacher
Experience initiative about: English

THANH HOÁ – 2019


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Pages
1. INTRODUCTION ...……………………………………………………. 1
1.1. The reason of selecting the topic ...…………………………………….. 1
1.2. Objectives of the study ...………………………………………………. 1
1.2.1. For the students………………………………………………………. 1
1.2.2. For the teachers……………………………………………………….. 2
1.3. Research tasks ...………………………………………………………... 2
1.4. Scope of the study ...………………………………………………...….. 2
1.5. Methodology ...…………………………………...…………………….. 2
2. CONTENTS ...…………………………………………………………... 2
2.1. Theoretical background ………………………………………………... 2
2.2. Reality ...………………………………………………...……………… 2
2.3. Measure implementation ..………………………….………………...… 3

reading belong to language comprehension. Among those four skills, reading is
vital in language comprehension. It is one of the most significant skills to learn a
foreign language and to be successful in academic tasks (Anderson, 2003).
According to Carrell (2003) efficient reading is essential for long-term learning
objectives and critical for students to pursue their academic goals. So, it is
important to find out problems that readers face while reading Lau (2006) and
teach them how to use reading strategies to improve their reading skills
effectively.
In the GCSE examination for graduation and higher education, it is reading
skill that is tested and it accounts for 36 percent of the entire marks. That is to
say having a good reading skill is very necessary.
After some years of teaching English at Muong Lat High School, I have
found that the students have not actively learnt English. Their English
competence is very low. They always say that learning English is the most
challenging subject for them especially when reading a passage. Normally, when
students are required to do the reading comprehension exercises, most of them
often read the whole passage, decode the meaning of the passage by translating
words by words whereas the passages are too long with a lot of new words, so
they do not have enough time to finish the tasks. Moreover, other the students do
the reading comprehension questions by circling the options randomly without
applying any reading strategies. As a result, students often get low mark when
doing this kind of exercises. Thus, there is a need to find out effective way to
help students enhance their reading situation.
The above reasons have inspired me to conduct my initiative with the title
"The effects of skimming technique in improving grade 12 students’ reading
comprehension at Muong Lat high school”.
1.2. Objectives of research
1.2.1. For the students
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(Grigg & Mann, 2008). The use of reading strategies is necessary for successful
reading comprehension. According to Richards and Renandya (2002), reading
strategies are plans for solving problems that readers encounter when
constructing meaning out of the text they read. That is to say, to have good
reading comprehension skills is very important. For 12 th graders, it is more
important because having good reading skills is one of the core factors to help
them achieve higher marks in the national GCSE examination.
2.2. Reality
During learning process, students at Muong Lat high school said that doing
reading comprehension is extremely difficult because this skill not only asks
students to read the text but also processes it and understands its meaning. In
fact, observing students doing reading comprehension, when they were
delivered the reading tasks, they all read the passage words by words trying to
decode the meaning of all the words, then they asked the teacher the meaning of
the questions. After that, they looked back the text again to find the answer. This
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was really time consuming and less effective. Some of them chose the answers
randomly without reading the passages at all. Thus, most of them got bad
results. The results of a small survey conducted by researcher at the beginning of
the school year 2018-2019 lies behind the reasons why the students got low
results in reading as shown in the table below. (The survey was conducted with
the participation of with 70 students in 2 intact classes – 12A and 12C - to find
out the ways they had done the reading tasks and why a lot of them got bad
marks).
The reasons
1. I try my best to identify each question, then scan and
skim the passage to find out the answer.
2. I read the whole passage and stop at every word.

have good reading skill. Most of them seemed very daunting when facing with
reading comprehension questions. One reason might have come from the teacher
was that students were not taught how to apply the reading techniques whereas
they may save reading time and improve the scores.
2.3. Measure implementation
The first task of my study was to make students understand what the
skimming means, what kinds of questions in the reading comprehension can be
answered by using skimming. Then, I adapted the reading passages in the
textbook to make them familiar to students as well as gave them extra-exercises
to practise.
2.3.1. Skimming technique and its importance
Skimming is one of strategies that require readers to read quickly in order
to get an overview or the general idea or gist of a section. Djuwarsih (2006)
stated that skimming is a skill of getting general idea of a text. It means that we
need only short time to read the text. It is because general idea of the text
3


usually is located at certain lines or certain sentences of the text. In other word,
we only need to read certain parts or lines of the text quickly. It is also supported
by Djuharie (2008) who claimed that skimming refers to look at the text quickly
for getting the main idea from the text. It may be true that by using skimming,
readers don’t need to read the whole text. They only need to look at the text
quickly and find the main idea of the text. So, they wouldn’t waste their time
when they are reading the text. In addition, Hanckock in Simanjuntak (1989: 58)
also says that in preview skimming a reader reads the introductory information,
the heading and subheading, and the summary, if one is provided. After
skimming, decide whether to read the material more thoroughly, and select the
appropriate speed which to read. Skimming to get an overview is an important
skill for students. By skimming to get the “gist” of the material, the students are

students how to answer the questions for main ideas by using skimming
technique.
4


Most of the reading passages in GCSE examination contain at least one
question for main idea. This type of question can be asked in different ways.
Students can identify it base on different words such as “topic”, “title”,
“subject”, “primary idea”, “main idea”, “main point”, “main concern”, or
“main purpose” and the organization of the passage. It can be shown clearly in
the table below:
Main idea questions

Organizations

+ What is the topic of the
passage?
+ What is the subject of the
passage?
+ What is the main idea of the
passage?
+ What is the author's main
Identifying
point in the passage?
general
+ With what is the author
questions
primarily concerned?
+ Which of the following would
be the best title?

+ On the one hand, on the
other hand, more, less, least,
most…
+ Cause, result in, deal with,
solution…

+ Read the first sentence of each
paragraph
+ Find out the common ideas
between these first sentences
and their relationship.
+ Pay attention to repeated
words
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+ Quickly skim the whole text to
confirm the main idea.
+ Eliminate the wrong answers,
choose the correct one, the
answers are not too general, too
specific or not mentioned.
+ Students should leave this
question last after answering
other questions to save time
because of its difficulty.
2.3.4. The adaptation of the textbook.
During my teaching process, I have adapted reading passages in the
textbook - especially textbook Tieng Anh 12 – Basic - to make them similar to
the ones appearing in the State’s high school graduation examination. Take the