Antes de leer: Reading Strategies:
General Strategies
In this and all subsequent chapters, before you start reading authentic
texts taken from online editions of Spanish newspapers, you will learn
strategies which are intended to help you reading and understanding the
articles more quickly and more efficiently.
What kind of texts am I going to read?
All the text you are going to read in this book and online are newspaper
articles. The main purpose of a newspaper in the old days was to
transmit information. This information could be in the form of a news article
(una noticia), an interview (una entrevista), a documentation (una documentación)
or a report (un reportaje).
In our days, things have changed a little bit. Newspapers are not anymore
the sole source for people to find out about what is going on around them.
Take yourself as an example. Do you read the newspaper to find out about
the world, or are you discovering it rather through TV, radio, and
the WWW? This shift has lead to the appearance of journalistic formats
which are mixing information and interpretation. Examples are chronicles
(crónicas) and interpretative reports (reportajes interpretativos).
There is a third kind of articles, in which dominates not the information,
but the interpretation of it. Examples for this are the news analysis (el
análisis), and the editorial (el editorial).
In this book you will encounter only the first kind, informative articles.
What you are supposed to do is to retrieve from them all the information
dealing with the topic of the chapter, to reenforce what you have already
learned in the introduction, plus new and interesting details, to go beyond
it.
What is Scanning?
Therefore, the most common strategy deployed by you will be the scanning
for information. Scanning is used to locate specific information or a fact.
It involves looking for details of interest and/ or specific words that
contribute to understand the reading.Obviously, before you start reading,
you must know what information you are looking for (for example the answers
to the comprehension questions which follow every article).
What is Skimming?
Another important strategy you will use, is called Skimming.
Skimming is used to gain an overview or general idea of what the material
is about. It is used to read material in a hurry. When you skim, you do
not read every word. You are just looking for the main ideas. When skimming
an article, you should first look at headings and subheadings. Then you
should skim every paragraph, considered as a more or less defined unit
of meaning, with links to the information in the previous and following
paragraph. The first sentence of every paragraph is usually the topic sentence,
which means that it introduces the theme of the paragraph. The rest of
it may include several sentences, to develop the topic sentence, restricting
or expanding it.
Newspaper articles usually don’t have conclusions or summaries.
The headlines (el título)
In a news article, the heading emerges from the “entradilla”. Nevertheless,
good journalists always try to come up first with a headline before they
start writing the first paragraph or the “entradilla”. This way, the writer
defines exactly what (s)he wants to tell the reader in the article, and,
subsequently, establishes the topic, and what events and facts will have
to appear in the first paragraph. You can compare the writing of a newspaper
article with the building of a house by the roof: First you design the
roof, and then pillars and walls to support it. The roof marks the
end or purpose of the building towards which the entire construction
process is directed.
A role of thumb is: the shorter a title, the better the news. A first
class news in Spain was the heading “Franco ha muerto” in 1975. For the
Spanish reader three words were sufficient to understand, because every
Spaniard knew that this was big news, either because they had desperately
longed for it, or because they had feared for this moment to come. Outside
of Spain, for example in the United States, this event was announced with
headings like “Muere el dictador español Franco” or “Fallece el
general Franco tras 40 años de dictadura en España”, to close
the gap and to give the potential reader more background information, hoping
that the death of a dictator would attract the American reader’s attention.
This means, the better you understand the introduction to the chapter,
and the more you have familiarized yourself with the various aspects of
Spanish society, the easier it will be for you to understand the
headings and, eventually, the articles.
The subheading or first paragraph (la entradilla)
Press agencies usually start an article with a short account of the news,
and, if necessary, give background information, to get the reader’s
attention, and to lay the foundations for the development and interpretation
of the news. This is called “entradilla”.