Language Focus 1: Reading for main idea and for detail
In getting information about nurses in ASEAN, the following reading skills are useful:
Reading for main idea—in which you have to recognize paragraph and topic sentence.
Reading for details—Ask wh-questions: What, When, Where, Why, How, Who, Whom, Whose
Reading skills
Scanning—You use scanning techniques for specific information needed.
Skimming—You read quickly just to get the main idea and decide if you want to read further.
Pronoun references—You need to know which pronoun refers to whom or to what idea.
Guessing meaning—You can guess the meaning of the words you don’t know by studying the context of the word: the sentence, the topic of the paragraph, and using your world knowledge of the topic. This is to get the general idea of the text. If you want to make sure of the meaning of the words, you can look them up in a dictionary.