Skimming and Scanning

Skimming is reading a text quickly to get a general idea of what it is about. Scanning is reading a text quickly to pick out specific information. Both are fast and selective, and they differ in purpose: skimming looks for the shape of the whole text, scanning looks for one piece of it.

Where the terms come from

The pair belongs to the standard teacher training vocabulary for reading, and the British Council’s own glossary gives the two definitions in one line each: Skimming is reading a text quickly to get a general idea of what it is about and Scanning is reading a text quickly to pick out specific information. Its Teaching Knowledge Database entries define each one against the other, which is a useful signal in itself. Neither term is fully defined without the other.

The reason they are taught at all is the reason adults read this way outside a classroom. A reader looks at a news page to see whether anything matters to them, then looks at a timetable to find one departure. Neither act involves reading the page. A learner who treats every English text as something to be decoded word by word is slower than they need to be in exactly the situations where speed is the point.

In language testing the same two behaviours are placed inside a larger model. Cambridge describes reading as a set of decisions the reader makes before and during the task, including whether it needs to be local or global, careful or expeditious, and places the pair precisely: Scanning for specific information requires expeditious local reading, whereas searching for important details and skimming for gist require expeditious global reading. Expeditious reading, in the formulation Katalayi and Sivasubramaniam quote, involves a quick, selective and efficient reading to access needed text information.

The Council of Europe’s framework takes the same two behaviours and treats them as one purpose rather than two techniques. They sit together in the Reading for orientation scale, which describes a reader working through material to find out whether it contains anything useful, and locating it when it does.

The difference in one table

	Skimming	Scanning
The question in the reader’s head	What is this text about, and is it worth my time.	Where is the price, the date, the name.
What the reader knows in advance	Nothing yet. The shape of the text is the thing being discovered.	Exactly what is wanted, often its form as well: a number, a capital letter, a time.
What the eye does	Samples the whole: title, headings, first lines, anything in bold.	Hunts for a match and ignores everything that is not it.
Scope	Global. The outcome is a sense of the whole text.	Local. The outcome is one item, and the rest stays unread.
What the reader ends with	A topic, a gist, a judgement about relevance.	A fact, and usually no memory of the surrounding text.
Everyday example	Looking at a news article to decide whether to read it.	Checking a museum page for the entrance fee.
Classroom task that produces it	One global question, answered in under a minute.	Three or four specific items to find against the clock.

The row that does most of the work is the second one. Scanning is easier than skimming because the reader already knows what the target looks like, which is why a scanning task with a clear target succeeds even with learners whose general comprehension is weak. Skimming asks for a judgement about a text the learner has not read, and that is a harder thing to do in a second language than it looks.

Where they sit among the ways of reading

Neither term means fast reading in general, and neither is the opposite of careful reading on its own. The Cambridge model crosses two decisions, how carefully and how widely, which gives four kinds of reading rather than two.

	Global, the whole text	Local, part of the text
Expeditious, quick and selective	Skimming for gist, and search reading for the important details.	Scanning for a specific item.
Careful, reading to comprehend	Building the meaning of the whole text and making inferences.	Working out a sentence, a phrase or an unknown word.

The third term in that top row is the one teachers rarely name. Search reading sits between the other two: the reader knows the topic they want but not the exact words it will appear in, which is what somebody does when looking through a long report for whatever it says about costs. A lesson that offers only skimming and scanning leaves out the kind of reading learners most often need for study.

Using them in a lesson

1. Set the purpose before the text is visible. This is the whole technique. A reason to read that arrives after the text does is not a reason, because the reading has already started.
2. Give one question for a skim, several for a scan. A single global question keeps learners out of the detail. A scan needs a short list of targets so that the hunt repeats and becomes quick.
3. Time it, and make the time slightly uncomfortable. The British Council’s own note on skimming is that teachers often set it as a timed task to encourage speed. Thirty to sixty seconds for a skim of a page is enough to stop a careful read breaking out.
4. Say out loud that the whole text is not to be read. Learners who have been taught to value thoroughness will not stop reading just because the clock is running. They need permission.
5. Check the instructions. Two concept checking questions take half a minute. Are you reading every word. How long have you got.
6. Do the feedback on how, not only on what. Ask where in the text the answer was and what told them to look there. The transferable part of the lesson is the strategy, not the answer.
7. Put the careful reading after, not instead. The usual sequence is skim for the shape, scan or search for what is needed, then read closely only the part that matters. The three stages teach each other.

A worked classroom example

A B1 class of fourteen adults in Galway, a lesson built on a 700 word web article about a summer arts festival. The text is face down on the desk before anything is said about it.

Skim, one minute. One question on the board before the page is turned: is this article mainly about the programme, the ticketing, or the money the festival brings into the town. Learners turn the page, read for sixty seconds, turn it back. Hands up for the three options. Nobody is asked to justify the choice in detail yet.

Scan, ninety seconds. Four targets on the board: the dates, the price of a day ticket, the name of the main venue, and the number of acts. Learners race. The targets are deliberately all short and visually distinctive, which is what makes scanning feel different from reading.

Feedback on the strategy, four minutes. Where did you look first for the price. How did you know the dates were near the top. Several learners will say they found the dates without reading the sentence around them, which is the exact behaviour the stage is meant to produce, and it is worth naming when it happens.

Careful reading, twelve minutes. Now the class reads one paragraph properly, the one on what the festival costs the council, with comprehension questions that need inference. By this point learners know where that paragraph is and roughly what it says, so the hard reading starts from a position of orientation rather than from nothing.

Transfer, five minutes. A second short text, a one minute skim, one question. The point of repeating it in the same lesson is that a strategy practised once is an activity, and a strategy practised twice begins to be a habit.

Commonly confused with

Term	Often confused with	The distinction
Skimming	Scanning	Skimming builds a general picture of the whole text. Scanning retrieves one item from it. The two are so often said together that learners assume they are the same speed reading habit, and then do neither.
Skimming	Reading for gist	Close to synonyms. Gist is the outcome, the general sense of the text, and skimming is the way of reading that produces it. The British Council treats reading a text for gist as skimming.
Scanning	Search reading	A scan looks for a target the reader could describe in advance. Search reading looks for whatever the text says about a topic, so the reader has to recognise relevance rather than match a word.
Skimming	Speed reading	Speed reading claims to raise the rate at which a whole text is read. Skimming does not read the whole text at all. One is a claim about processing, the other is a choice about what to leave out.
Scanning	Intensive reading	Both are local, and that is where the resemblance stops. Intensive reading works out the meaning of a short passage in detail. Scanning avoids meaning wherever it can.
Skimming and scanning	Prediction	Prediction happens before the text is read, from the title, the pictures or the topic. Skimming is the first contact with the text itself, and it is often what confirms or corrects the prediction.
Skimming and scanning	Extensive reading	Extensive reading is long, usually for pleasure, with attention on overall meaning. It is slow in total and selective in nothing. The two sit at opposite ends of how much of a text is actually read.

What the evidence actually supports

They are two different things, and the research names them separately. The Cambridge model places scanning as expeditious reading at the local level and skimming as expeditious reading at the global level. That is not a stylistic distinction. The two make different demands, and a learner can be good at one and poor at the other.

The boundaries between the fast strategies are genuinely blurred. Katalayi and Sivasubramaniam, reviewing work in this tradition, record that skimming, search reading and scanning involved some overlapping processes and actions, enough that researchers have disagreed about the labels. Teachers who find the distinction slippery in practice are not misunderstanding it.

Tests, and by extension many lessons, weight careful reading far more heavily. In their own analysis of fifty multiple choice items from a national examination, Katalayi and Sivasubramaniam classified thirty two items, sixty four per cent, as targeting careful reading, against eighteen items, thirty six per cent, targeting expeditious reading. If reading practice follows the shape of the test, fast reading gets a small fraction of the time.

Scanning items tend to be the easy ones. The same literature associates items that require scanning with the easiest reading tasks, which is an argument for using them to build confidence and against treating a successful scan as evidence that a text has been understood.

The limits are worth stating. Much of this work comes from language testing rather than from classrooms, and it describes what readers do during a test rather than what they can be taught to do over a course. The model is a well evidenced description of reading behaviour. It is not, in itself, proof that teaching the labels to learners improves their reading, and that step is still an inference.

Sources and further reading

The six linked sources below were opened and checked on 4 November 2026. The remaining items are books with no freely readable edition to link to, so they are cited bibliographically rather than linked.

Source	What it provides
British Council, Skimming, Teaching Knowledge Database	The reference entry, the contrast with scanning, and the note that teachers often set skimming as a timed task to encourage speed.
British Council, Scanning, Teaching Knowledge Database	The reference entry for scanning, defined against skimming, with the point that choosing how to read is itself part of building reading skills.
British Council, Teaching Reading and Writing: Reading skills	The one line glossary definitions of skimming and scanning quoted at the top of this page, and a worked sequence that skims before it scans.
British Council, Theories of reading: Part 2	The four way set used here, with skimming and scanning placed alongside intensive and extensive reading and tied to reading purpose.
Cambridge University Press and Assessment, Reading, the Linguaskill construct document	The Weir and Khalifa model of reading, and the placement of scanning as expeditious local reading and skimming as expeditious global reading.
Katalayi, G. B. and Sivasubramaniam, S. (2013), Careful reading versus expeditious reading: investigating the construct validity of a multiple choice reading test, Theory and Practice in Language Studies 3(6), 877 to 884	The definition of expeditious reading used here, the sixty four to thirty six per cent split between careful and expeditious items, and the record of overlap between the fast strategies.
Council of Europe, Common European Framework of Reference for Languages	The framework whose Reading for orientation scale treats skimming and scanning as one reading purpose described at each level, in the Companion Volume below.
Council of Europe (2020), Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Companion Volume	The Reading for orientation descriptor scale, which is where this pair of behaviours appears in CEFR terms.
Khalifa, H. and Weir, C. J. (2009), Examining Reading: Research and Practice in Assessing Second Language Reading, Studies in Language Testing 29, Cambridge University Press	The full account of the careful and expeditious model at global and local level that the Cambridge document above summarises.
Urquhart, A. H. and Weir, C. J. (1998), Reading in a Second Language: Process, Product and Practice, Longman	The earlier source for expeditious reading and for the distinction between scanning and search reading used in this entry.
Nuttall, C. (2005), Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language, Macmillan	Standard practical guidance on setting a reason to read before the text is distributed, and on sequencing fast reading before close reading.

Frequently asked questions

What is skimming and scanning?

Skimming is reading a text quickly to get a general idea of what it is about. Scanning is reading a text quickly to pick out specific information. Both are fast, selective ways of reading in which most of the text is deliberately left unread, and they differ in what the reader is looking for: the shape of the whole text in one case, a single item in the other.

What is the difference between skimming and scanning?

The difference is the purpose, and it shows in what the reader knows before starting. A reader who skims does not yet know what the text contains and is trying to find out. A reader who scans already knows exactly what is wanted, often down to its form, such as a time or a price, and is looking for a match. Skimming is global and produces a gist. Scanning is local and produces one fact.

Which comes first in a lesson, skimming or scanning?

Skimming, in the usual sequence. A short global task orients learners to the text, after which scanning or close reading has somewhere to start from. The one exception is a text whose only purpose is retrieval, such as a timetable or a listings page, where there is no gist worth building and scanning is the whole task.

Are skimming and scanning skills or strategies?

Both words are used, and the difference matters less in a classroom than it does in a research paper. Teacher training materials usually call them reading sub skills. Testing research treats them as types of reading or as strategies a reader selects according to purpose. What is consistent across both is that the reader chooses them deliberately, which is the part worth teaching.

How do you teach skimming and scanning to lower level learners?

Keep the text short and the target visually distinctive, and start with scanning, which is the easier of the two. Numbers, dates, capitalised names and prices can be found by learners whose general comprehension is still weak, and finding them quickly builds the confidence to try a skim. Always set the time limit and the question before the text is handed out.

What is search reading, and how is it different from scanning?

Search reading is looking through a text for whatever it says about a topic, rather than for a target the reader could name in advance. Scanning matches a known item. Search reading requires the reader to judge relevance as they go, which makes it harder and more useful for study, and it is the fast reading strategy most often left out of lessons.

Related terms in this glossary

• Jigsaw reading, where the same reading sub skills are put to work inside a speaking task.
• Comprehensible input, the argument for texts learners can mostly understand, which is what makes fast reading possible at all.
• Concept checking questions, the half minute that stops a timed reading task being misunderstood.
• Guided discovery, the same principle applied to language rather than to text: let learners find it before you explain it.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For the qualification and career terminology behind classroom practice, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained on The TEFL Institute. For what Irish employers ask for and how much practical teaching a course covers, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 4 November 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.