The THEME ARCHIVE at the British Council website

At last it is getting a bit warmer here in the UK! The winter was the coldest for years with tons of snow, which is unusual for us – we even had a bit of snow in South Devon which is very unusual (it is called ‘The English Riveria’ where I live believe it or not!).

I’d like to tell you about THE THEME ARCHIVE at the British Council Website as a great place to visit to improve your English. Let’s take the topic of global warming – after all it’s always in the news and I guess we should all know more about it. If you go to the THEME ARCHIVE at the British Council website you can find an excellent article on this topic. What I like about the resource is the variety of activities available. Firstly, you can read the article and you can listen to it as well because there is an MP3 audio file with it. You can look up words in an online dictionary really easily by just double clicking on any word and its definition comes up. There are accompanying comprehension exercises and you can write in to give your comments about the article and read what other English learners think about it too. Start exploring this resource by looking at this reading on Aeroplanes and Global Warming here and doing all the activities that go with it.

The SQ3R Reading Method

It must be autumn because I have taken my boat out of the water for the winter and there has been a stock market crash!

The SQ3R is a strategy for effective academic reading which has been around for decades. It is all about standing back and looking at the outline of the text you are going to read, preparing for the reading by getting some questions ready, looking for answers as you read, remembering what you read and then reviewing what you’ve read so you don’t forget it. All these techniques lead to ACTIVE reading and reading with a DEEP APPROACH which I have mentioned before. It is completely different to the casual reading that you do in your spare time. You might be thinking ‘That sounds like hard work!’ and you would be right – it is WORK. Rather like an athelete who has to put the hours in to become fit enough to win a competition, students have to put the hours in to learn their subject and polish their academic skills so they can do well in their studies.

SQ3R stands for:

SURVEY:

Survey the text you are going to read. This means reading the title and thinking about what it means. Look through the text and look at the sub-headings and the summary. Look at any diagrams or pictures. After your survey you should have a good idea about what the text is about.

QUESTION

Before you start reading carefully look at the first heading and think of some questions that you think will be answered in this section of the text. If the text is ‘THE STORY OF COCA COLA’ and the first section has the heading ‘Beginnings’ then you might note down some questions such as:

When was the company started?

Where was it started?

Who started it?

Now you have a reason to read! Your reading should be focused with an aim.

READ

Now read that first section of the text and look for the answers to the questions that you wrote. You may not find all the answers, but what is important is that you are reading for a good reason and you will try to understand everything you read because you are looking for particular information. You may find other important information that you didn’t think of asking about. MARK YOUR TEXT! Underline things, write things in the margin!

RECALL

When you have finished reading that section stop! Can you now say what the most important parts of the text that you read are? Can you look at the questions that you wrote earlier and say the answers out loud without reading the text? This RECALL is sometimes referred to as RECITE which means ‘to say something from you memory’. If you can’t recall or recite the main points of what you’ve read then it hasn’t made an impression on you!

REVIEW

When you have worked through the whole text this way you need to review what you have read. But not just once at the end of your reading. If you never looked at this text again, it is unlikely that you would remember the content of what you read very well. Can you say what the main points of the text are the next day? If you reviewed your reading by recalling the main points of the sections of the text the following day then you would be helping this information get into your long-term memory. It is not a case of memorising sentences word for word, but a case of reviewing the main points so that you can articulate them in your own words.

There are any number of good web resources which give further information about SQ3R, just google SQ3R and you will find plenty. You should always use a number of different sources to gain a proper understanding of something.  Birbeck College, University of London, have some great learning resources. You can see the list via today’s link. Scroll down to READING SKILLS and follow the link for ‘Reading Academic Texts: SQ3R’.  Here it is.

The QUASAR method of reading

Thanks to students who are emailing me. I am always pleased to hear from you even if it takes me a long time to reply. Unfortunately I cannot give everyone individual advice because I also have a full time job! Do remember that you can sign up to receive my posts by email. That means that you don’t have to keep coming here to see if there is a new post!

Quasar sounds like a really cool thing. Whenever I see or hear this word I think of young boys running around in the dark wearing special jackets shooting each other. That’s because ‘Quasar’ is a place in Torquay where you do just this and my sons have been there on a number of occasions for birthday parties. It is also the name of a system for reading:

QU – question

A – be Active

S – systems

A – analyse

R – reflect

There is an excellent study guide from the University of Southampton which I am going to point you to which explains this method of reading and it also has a number of excellent awareness raising activities too. This particular resource is not specially designed for international students, but it is intended to support all students needing to improve their academic reading skills. The resource needs more than one sitting! Don’t just read it all through and then forget about it. In fact, if you did that then you would be doing exactly what it is telling you NOT to do! The whole point is to read it with a deep approach so that you understand and reflect on what you read. You might be used to reading things from start to finish, to get SURFACE information from a text that you can memorise and then use in assessments. International students who continue with this SURFACE approach to study at university in English speaking countries will not do well. Don’t take my word for it, have a look at the study guide from Southampton University. The link takes you to a collection of study guides and you should follow the link ‘Reading Academically’ which is the third on the page. As I said, there is a lot of information and you should read a bit of it, and then act on it. It would be a good idea to read the introduction to the study guide, and then read sections 1.0 , 1.1 and 1.2. You can read these  here.

When you have read those sections you should be thinking carefully about whether you read with a SURFACE or a DEEP approach, and the importance of a deep approach. So when you’ve read the sections, done the exercises and thought about it, go and do some deep reading around your subject!

Academic reading strategies

It’s exciting to see all the new students walking around the campus! I hope that wherever you are you find some useful tips and links on this site. Remember you can sign up for e mails of my new posts by using the form on the right of the page and that way you don’t need to keep coming back to see if you have missed anything. You will not be spammed if you subscribe – your e mail address will only be used to deliver these posts, I hate junk mail as much as anyone!

To return to the subject of Academic Reading, the most important thing is for you to be aware of different strategies that are available to you and to use the correct one in the correct situation. Today I am going to talk about skimming and scanning. In later posts I’ll think about reading for detail and  SQ3R and QUASAR methods for helping you read efficiently. It is really a bad habit to start to read an academic text just by going right to the beginning and then continuing to read every sentence one after the other, looking up every word you don’t know in a dictionary.  Imagine you want to move to a new house, or you want to buy a new car and you go to see this new house/car to see if you want it. What is the first thing you do? Well, I think the first thing you do is look at it from the outside to see if it is what you want. Don’t you stand back and look at it from different angles to see if it meets your needs? If it looks OK, then you go inside and start to investigate it carefully. Similarly with an academic text you have to make sure that it is what you want before you go inside it – that is, before you start reading it carefully. The ‘stand back and look at it from different angles’ is essential. This is when you look at the title, the author, when it was written (what we sometimes calling ’surveying’ the text) and you skim and scan it. When you scan a text you are looking through it quickly to find key words or information. After scanning a text you should know if it has references to things you want to know about. Skimming is looking quickly through a text to gain a general impression of what it is about. You can often do this by reading only the title and sub-titles of a text, and the first sentence of each paragraph. You can do all this type of reading without using a dictionary! Remember the house – you haven’t stepped inside it yet, you are still looking at it from the outside. Surveying the text (title, author, date, etc) and skimming and scanning are essential academic reading skills for you and for native English speakers too who also need to develop these skills. The trick is to have the confidence to jump through a text ignoring whole bits of it. It may seem strange to you to do this. It may even feel like you are cheating! But it is an essential element to being an ACTIVE reader. Read more about surveying a text, skimming and scanning and improve these skills at Andy Gillett’s University of Hertfordshire website.