When it comes to the difference between reading skills and reading strategies, Hood and Joyce, in 1995 said “Skills refer to information-processing techniques that are automatic, whether at the level of recognising grapheme-phoneme correspondence or summarising a story. Skills are applied to a text unconsciously for many reasons including expertise, repeated practice, compliance with directions, luck and naïve use. In contrast strategies are actions selected deliberately to achieve particular goals. An emerging skill can become a strategy when it is used intentionally. Likewise, a strategy can ‘go underground’ … and become a skill. Indeed strategies are more efficient and developmentally advanced when they become generated and applied automatically as skills.Thus, strategies are skills under consideration.”

In short, we could say that reading skills are generally defined as automatic processing abilities, whereas strategies are deliberate actions performed to achieve a particular goal. A skill can become a strategy when it is used intentionally.

Individual readers use different reading strategies for different types of texts, in different contexts, and when reading for different purposes. Knowledge of reading strategies does not make up for a lack of language knowledge in L2: only where learners have sufficient language knowledge does providing instruction in text structure and reading strategies lead to more advanced reading abilities.

In the classrrom, for the purpose of improving and developing reading skills and strategies, teachers are advised to:

- motivate students to practise reading a variety of text types while considering the effectiveness of using different strategies on them.

- require students to discuss questions such as: How is the text organised? (paragraphs, subheadings etc). Do headings, pictures or diagrams help you guess what the text is about? What do you already know about the topic? What parts of the text will you read in detail to find specific information? What will you do when you find an unknown word?

- help students to develop their metacognitive knowledge by explaining or eliciting: what the strategy is; why, how, when and where the strategy should be used; how to evaluate use of the strategy.

- have students keep a diary of the strategies they use to read a range of different texts, compare strategies used for different text types, and discuss strategy use with other students in pairs or small groups.