Improving Reading and Writing Skills: Strategies and Recommendations

This report comprehensively explores strategies to enhance students' reading and writing skills. It begins by defining the importance of these literacy skills in various contexts, including academics and professional settings. The main body of the report outlines specific techniques for improving reading abilities, such as skimming, scanning, note-taking, and reading for gist, emphasizing their benefits in comprehension and retention. It also provides suggestions for improving the quality of written assignments, including proofreading, incorporating feedback, time management, clear structuring, and utilizing sufficient sources. The report concludes with recommendations for students to actively engage in these strategies and a call to prioritize the development of both reading and writing skills to improve academic performance. The report references various books and journals to support its findings.

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ABSTRACT
The report focussed on the ways to improve the reading as well as writing abilities of the
students. The brief introduction was given regarding the purpose of the report. Various strategies
were evaluated which can help the students to improve their reading abilities and to consider
reading as an area of interest rather than burden or a task to be completed. This included
establishing a positive and nurturing environment, note making etc. Also, certain suggestions
were given such as time management, structuring the assignments etc. which can help the
students to improve the quality of their written assignment. At last, various recommendations
were suggested for the students to improve their reading and writing skills.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................4
MAIN BODY..................................................................................................................................4
1. Strategies to improve the reading abilities...............................................................................4
2. Suggestions for improving the quality of the written assignments of the students.................5
Recommendations............................................................................................................................7
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Reading and writing abilities are considered as the literacy skills which are considered as the
most important skills everywhere whether it is school, college, work or even at home. This helps
in discovering new things by educating oneself by research and thinking in one or the other field.
This also helps in improving the vocabulary, spellings, both written and verbal communication.
The main purpose of the report is to explore the ways in which students can increase their
reading ability as well as improve the quality of their written assignments. The various
recommendations will be given at the end which will help in making use of the mentioned
strategies for enhancing the ability of reading as well as writing for students.
MAIN BODY
1. Strategies to improve the reading abilities
Reading ability of the students is the ability to read, apprehend and interpret the words
written on any reading material or simply a page. Improving this skill helps the students
especially by enabling them in assimilating the written work in short duration during reading.
There are various strategies which can be used to improve the reading abilities of the students
and they are as follows.
 Skimming: This is basically a reading method which is strategic and selective in which
the main focus of the student is on the main ideas of the text. During this, the details and
the other elaboration in the text are skipped. This is done to extract the essence of the
main message of the author instead of focusing on the finer points. The things which
must be focussed are introduction, conclusion, section summaries, first and last
sentences, titles, headings, bold words, pictures or graphs and the end of the chapter
review questions (Kim and et.al., 2017). This helps in understanding the big picture and
sometimes recalling the content and the structure which is already read. This enhances
the interest of the student in the text which improves the reading ability.
 Scanning: This is the approach in which quick look is taken at the text. The basic
organisation is note when especially looking for some specific date, name, fact or word.
The main things noted while scanning the material are subtitles, titles, headings, graphs,
highlighted information which helps in preparing the student for understanding and
remembering the main topics of the text (Bartan, 2017). This may sometimes allow the
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person to read about 1,500 words per minute. This helps in locating the key terms for
assessing the relevance of the text.
 Note-taking: This is the basic skill which must be in a student. This helps a student in
gaining deeper understanding and reflection. Especially, this makes students able to
remember things well and in preparing the examination materials well. It is impossible
for the students to remember each and every thing taught in the class so in order to
memorize the things, notes are made for comprehending the lecture of the teacher and
they remember everything. This increases their interest as the notes are not too lengthy
and the main points are comparatively easy to remember (Raba, 2017).
 Establishing a nurturing environment: Environment plays a major role in deciding the
interest of the students in reading. If the student tries to concentrate towards any reading
material and there is much noise all around, then the student will not show interest in
reading. So, it is must to prepare the environment for reading such as the library, any
peaceful garden or park etc. which motivates the students to read and enhance their
ability to read.
 Reading for gist: Gist is basically the core idea of a written discourse. Reading for this
gives an opportunity to the students for preparing themselves to deeper understand the
text even when they are away from the classroom which is considered as safe. This is
considered as the very first step in the strategic approach towards reading. This makes the
students to read quickly and to focus on the relevant and significant text in the whole
content (Hubbard and Dunbar, 2017). This is a preparatory stage which makes the student
able to understand that which part of the text needs attention and which not. This also
saves the time of the student along with leading to a better result. With the regular
practice of reading for gist, the students can improve their reading skills by enjoying
reading for their own sake instead of meeting a specific end for example the reading test.
This leads to positive impact on the linguistic competence as well.
2. Suggestions for improving the quality of the written assignments of the students
Writing is considered both as an art and a skill. Quality plays a major role in any type of
writing whether it is freelancing or online for the students. They need to submit the written
assignments with a good quality in order to gain more marks as well as improving their writing
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skills. There are various suggestions which can help the students to improve the quality of their
written assignments.
 Proofreading: This is considered as the most important practice for the students while
writing any assignment. This practice demands creativity in which the sentence which is
poorly written needs to be modified or replaced completely. In order to modify any
sentence or replacing it, creativity is needed. Polishing the work again and again after
writing helps in eliminating the mistakes and improving the quality of the written work.
No word must be slipped during this which can cause a potential error (Saddler and et.al.,
2017). So proofreading must be more than once in order to rectify the errors not focussed
in one go.
 Listening to feedbacks: Feedback is basically given by the tutors, supervisors, project
managers and all those who guide the students. These are basically sharing information
regarding what is right, what is wrong and what needs to be done to rectify the wrong
done in less time. Feedback must be communicated properly so that the mistakes can be
avoided and time can be saved. This also helps in preventing the regrets of the people
who failed. Getting the proper feedbacks on time can help the students to correct their
written assignments and improve its quality (Ranalli, 2018).
 Time management: This is basically controlling and planning the time spends on certain
activity which plays a significant role in accomplishing the goals in any field especially at
the time of assignments in student’s life. An assignment can be divided in various parts
and those various parts need specific time to be completed. If more than decided time is
spent on one section, then there will be less time remaining for other sections hampering
the quality of it. So, time must be managed while doing the assignments so that the
quality of whole assignment is managed and improved.
 Clear structure and paragraphs: In every assignment, it is must to make sections and
specific parts. If the assignment is continuous having no sections or subsections then it
becomes less understandable for the reader and even looks less systematic and less
presentable or attractive. Therefore, written assignment must be clearly structured which
means it must contain headings, subheadings and titles and the whole content must be
distributed according to the headings and subheadings (Nihal, 2017). This improves the
quality of the assignment along with making its more understandable for the reader.
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 Using sufficient sources: While doing the written assignment, it is must for the students
to go through sufficient sources from where the content is taken. If the student searches
various books, articles, journals, online sites, websites, published research papers and
many more, then the chances of good assignment increases because after going through
sufficient sources, the student gains a deeper insight about the topic as well as the
content. Less number of sources bounds the knowledge of the student whereas optimal
number of resources helps in broadening the mind of the students regarding the
assignment. This helps in improving the assignment’s quality and credibility.
Recommendations
The students must be focused on improving their reading as well as writing skills. In
order to improve the reading skills and abilities, the students must not consider reading as a
burden or a task to be completed forcefully but must show interest so that they can be totally
involved in the practice instead of getting distracted or diverted from the material. The students
must be able to understand the difference between the relevant as well as irrelevant content. In
order to improve the quality of the written assignments, the students must get a thorough
knowledge of the content by going through various sources and then start writing the assignment
by managing the time (Ferretti and Lewis, 2018). The student must proofread again and again to
rectify the errors along with taking the feedback from the supervisor.
CONCLUSION
This can be concluded from the above report that reading and writing skills must be
developed among the students. This will not only develop them personally as well as
professionally but also helps in getting better grades in schools. The report highlighted many
strategies like skimming, scanning, reading for gist and many more for improving the reading
ability of the students. This was followed by describing some strategies such as taking feedbacks,
proofreading etc. which can help the students in improving the quality of their written
assignments. Various recommendations were given at last which can help the students in
improving their academic performance greatly.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Bartan, O.S., 2017. The effects of reading short stories in improving foreign language writing
skills. The Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal. 17(1). pp.59-74.
Ferretti, R.P. and Lewis, W.E., 2018. Argumentative writing. Best practices in writing
instruction, pp.135-161.
Hubbard, K.E. and Dunbar, S.D., 2017. Perceptions of scientific research literature and strategies
for reading papers depend on academic career stage. PloS one. 12(12). p.e0189753.
Kim, J.S. and et.al., 2017. Engaging struggling adolescent readers to improve reading
skills. Reading Research Quarterly. 52(3). pp.357-382.
Nihal, G.Ö.Y., 2017. An action research on the development of self-regulated writing strategies
of Turkish EFL students. Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics. 3(2). pp.191-204.
Raba, A.A.A., 2017. The influence of think-pair-share (TPS) on improving students’ oral
communication skills in EFL classrooms. Creative Education. 8(1). pp.12-23.
Ranalli, J., 2018. Automated written corrective feedback: how well can students make use of
it?. Computer Assisted Language Learning. 31(7). pp.653-674.
Saddler, B. and et.al., 2017. Effects of a summarizing strategy on written summaries of children
with emotional and behavioral disorders. Remedial and Special Education. 38(2). pp.87-
97.
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