This page lists articles to improve your academic reading skills
Academic reading skills are essential if you are going to succeed at university. Firstly, you cannot read everything on your reading list because your reading list is going to be very long! Secondly, you cannot simply start at the beginning of a book or article and read it to the end! Therefore you need to be active, to jump around, to find what you want, to evaluate what you read and reject what you don’t want. These articles will help you:
- Being an active reader
- The QUASAR method of reading
- The SQ3R method
- Reading strategies – surveying, skimming and scanning
- Speed reading
And here is a good study guide from the University of Plymouth in the UK entitled Reading Effectively.
Another important thing for students to think about is non-academic reading too. By which I mean reading other things in English. Many students who have English as a second language only read English when they absolutely have to for their study. This makes reading in English a chore! If you can, find English language material which you want to read and read as much as you can. Try to spend a few minutes every day just reading in English your reading skills and your overall English language skills will improve tremendously. If you are able to read a whole book in English then that is great. But if you don’t want to do that, read things like the news, or magazine articles about things you are particularly interested in. For best results, set up a pattern so you spend a regular amount of time reading in English every day.
