Reading Strategies -- What? Me use a Strategy?

Now that I have overcome my initial technical difficulties in actually submitting a blogpost for the first time in my life, I am happy to weigh in on the first of the two questions about this past week's article for German Online Reading.

I should start by stating that I have not always been the most strategic in my forays into reading -- in German or any other language.  Certainly, when required to be strategic -- as when I was being tested by Herr Dunkelberg for admission into this class -- I employed one of the techniques described in this article -- namely "skimming."  That was how I determined which article I would chose to discuss over the phone.  I engaged in "predicting the meaning" when I was looking at the cartoon for the same test.  In that case, however, my prediction only got me so far.  I realized by the end that the punch line of the cartoon was different than I had expected -- hence the humor.

To state the view I am sure others would share, I do vary my strategies for reading depending on the nature of the text I am reading and the purpose.  In the past, when I have been asked to translate a text, I have engaged primarily in linear, intensive reading.  I started at the beginning and worked through to the end -- with a dictionary close at hand.  That is probably my default approach.  I suspect, however, I won't be doing much of that sort of reading in the future.  More likely I will have a limited time to locate information of interest, so I will be skimming or scanning.

I confess that I am not as deliberate in how I approach reading -- in German or other foreign languages -- as I probably should be. I am grateful for the article identifying strategies I have employed in the past and giving them a name which will make it easier for me to make use them going forward as well as identifiying new or slightly different strategies I may be able to use in the future.