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.

Reading actively

I saw an interesting headline for an article in a British newspaper: ‘Chinese students continue to choose British universities‘. This headline makes it sound like Chinese students choose British universities rather than universities in other countries. However, after some surfing around the subject, I found an article in an Australian newspaper (published on the same day!) with the title: ‘High university cost fails to deter university students’. The Australian article says that the number of Chinese students has risen by 22.8% this year in Australia. Going back to the British newspaper, I learned that the number of Chinese students at British universities has only increased by 14.7%! Perhaps the headline for the British newspaper should have been ‘Chinese students prefer Australia!’ (Read The Guardian article in the UK here and The Australian Higher Education article here.)

Wherever you come from I wish you every success in your studies. It is likely that you are going to read a lot for your course so developing your reading skills should be a priority for you. For that reason I am going to say some things about reading over the next couple of posts. The first thing to say about reading is that it is not the same activity each time you do it! When I read my novel in bed before switching the light off at the end of the day I read ’passively’ – I start at the top of the page and read the story steadily at the same speed (I sometimes even get to the bottom of the page before I fall asleep!).  This type of reading for pleasure is often called ‘extensive reading’ by teachers. What is important about this type of reading is that you choose the book and you don’t worry too much about difficult words you come across. Your extensive reading may be ‘readers’ (shorter simpler versions of real novels) or more authentic materials written for any reader. You may not ‘enjoy’ the reading at first but (rather like taking exercise) you will see the benefits in the long run. But I actually wanted to think more about the other type of reading which you do academically, for study, and when you read for study you are an ACTIVE reader. There is nothing passive about reading for study! If you start at the first word and read steadily through the text it is unlikely that you are going to achieve your goals. What are your goals for reading the text? Are you sure you want to read the text at all? How do you know if it will be useful for you? What parts of the text will be useful? What point is the writer making? What notes will you make? What are your notes for? All these questions make you into an ACTIVE READER as you employ a variety of strategies to help you meet your goals and over the next few posts I’d like to give you some tips on how to start developing or continue improving your reading strategies. The starting point is to raise your awareness of the topic of academic reading and for that I am pointing you to this page on Study Advice and Learning Development from the University of Reading.  This page gives you an overview of the issue of academic reading and you can read it here.

English for University is back – nearly!

As you can see this new website is still being built (it is taking longer than I imagined, surprise surprise!). The archive of posts is here on the right of the page, and I am working on getting the other links up.

If you would like to visit the old site you can find it at:

English for University

but all that information will be here within a day or two. Please let me know if any of you have problems receiving posts via e mail.

Meanwhile, I have very much enjoyed reading about the supermarket Tesco and its language difficulties! If you go into a supermarket you can always see a sign directing shoppers to a fast queue, but in Tesco you can only join the fast queue if you have “Ten items or less”. Of course, this is grammatically incorrect because ‘less’ is a word used with uncountable nouns (such as water, sand) not countable nouns, in this case ‘items’. If you are interested in such things you can read the article about Tesco in the BBC Magazine here.

The other link today is to a couple of online exercises which practice the language point of expressing quantity. You can find the exercises, which come from the New Headway Upper Intermediate Oxford University Press pages, here.

Successful overseas students

Well, the pictures may not be very good, but I think the ideas they show are very important. We finished our summer course by thinking about the habits of successful overseas students. I think the most important things to take away from your summer school are a positive mental attitude and an awareness of how you can continue to improve your language skills.

Many students have commented that they want more listening practice and that we don’t do enough in class. There is never enough time to do everything you want in class, so it may be true that listening is often one of the things overlooked. But, you can listen outside class! The link today is to the online lectures provided by the Self-Access Centre for Language Learning at Reading University. This is a wonderful collection of real lectures given to English language students at Reading, complete with clearly typed transcripts so you can read what the lecturer says (after listening!) when there are things you did not understand. What I really like about these lectures is their authenticity (which means they are real) and they are accessible to everyone – you don’t need to be an expert on the topic to enjoy the lecture, they are aimed at a general audience. Here’s the link to these lectures.

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