Reading skills for academic study

Reading skills for academic study: an Introduction

You will need to practice:

• Understanding meaning: deducing the meaning of unfamiliar words and word groups; relations within the sentence/complex sentences; implications - information not explicitly stated, conceptual meaning, e.g. comparison, purpose, cause, effect.

• Understanding relationships in the text: - text structure; the communicative value of sentences; relations between the parts of a text through lexical and grammatical cohesion devices and indicators in discourse.

• Understanding important points; distinguishing the main ideas from supporting detail; recognising unsupported claims and claims supported by evidence - fact from opinion; extracting salient points to summarise; following an argument; reading critically/evaluating the text.

• Reading efficiently: surveying the text, chapter/article, paragraphs, skimming for gist/general impression; scanning to locate specifically required information; reading quickly.

Reading skills for academic study: Advice

• You need to learn to read efficiently - you cannot read every word of every book.

• Learning about how texts in your subject are structured will help you to read more efficiently. (Rhetorical Fuction)

• But most importantly, you need to read.

you will learn

• what efficient reading is

• How to do efficient reading

• practice to read academic text efficiently

"General efficient reading strategies such as scanning to find the book or chapter, skimming to get the gist and careful reading of important passages (Wallace, 1980, pp. 9-51) are necessary as well as vocabulary building exercises in your own area. Learning about how texts are structured can also help you to read more efficiently"

Efficient (fast) reading skills

Reading involves the use of the eyes and the brain. In order to read fast, you need to use more of your brain. This means not wasting time and using your eyes and brain together well. To do this, you need to read purposefully and interactively.

Purposeful

Reading is purposeful. The way you read something will depend on your purpose. You read different texts in different ways.

Poll

How do you read a Novel?

• I start at the beginning and slowly move towards the end.

• I read quickly to find relevant sections, t

• I read carefully when you have found what I want.

Poll

How do you read an academic text (such as text book)

• I start at the beginning and slowly move towards the end

• I read quickly to find relevant sections.

• I read carefully when you I found what I want.

Poll

How do you read a Newspaper?

• I start at the beginning and slowly move towards the end.

• I read quickly to find relevant sections.

• I read carefully when I have found what I want.

Interactive

Reading is an interactive process - it is a two-way process. As a reader you are not passive but active. This means you have to work at constructing the meaning from the marks on the paper, which y ou use as necessary. You construct the meaning using your knowledge of the language, your subject and the world, continually predicting and assessing.MacLachlan & Reid (1994, pp. 3-4) talk about interpretive framing (Extratextual, Intratextual, Intertextual, Circumtextual ), which is essential in order to understand what you are reading.

useful skills to read efficiently

• Scanning to locate specifically required information.

• Skimming a text to get an overall impression.

• Surveying a text.

• Using the title. Sometimes you have to make quick decisions based on the title.

Multiple Choice

(Scanning) Read the following text quickly and fill in the table. What do the numbers given in the table refer to?

• a

• b

• c

• d

Surveying the text

Most of the time you will be reading serious academic texts books, journal articles and other academic texts. And often you will need to read your texts closely and carefully in order to understand specific information. However, you cannot read every word in every book in the library. Thus, you decide if it is useful and which parts need to be read more carefully. It is also much easier to read the texts in detail when you have a rough idea of what a text is about - roughly what the author's purpose is, what is at the beginning of the text and what is at the end.

Open Ended

Take any text and see which of the following are included: title (1), sub-title (2), list of references (3), date of publication (4), place of publication(5), publisher(6), index(7), list of contents(8), edition (9), preface (10), foreword (11), appendices (11), blurb on the back cover (12), author (13), ISBN (14), abstract (15), details about author (17), acknowledgments (18), reviewers' comments (19).

Multiple Choice

Look at the extracts from the following text and identify them.

• list of contents

• acknowledgments

• appendices

• acknowledgments

Using the title

Title, sub-titles and section heading can help you formulate questions to keep you interacting.

The title is a summary of the text. Sometimes we have to make quick decisions based on only the title. Therefore it is useful to try to understand it well. This may mean looking up unfamiliar words in a dictionary.

The questions to ask based on the title:

Is this text relevant to your needs?

Is it related to the subject you are studying? What do you expect to learn from the text? Ask yourself some questions that you expect the text to answer.

Multiple Choice

what is the clinical question of this journal article?

• Question Does remdesivir provide a benefit on clinical status for patients hospitalized with moderate COVID-19) pneumonia?

• Does standard care provide a benefit on clinical status for patients hospitalized with moderate COVID-19 pneumonia?

• Does hospitalization provide a benefit on clinical status for patients hospitalized with moderate COVID-19 pnumonia?

Skimming to get an overall impression.

Skimming to get an overall impression. Skimming is useful when you want to survey a text to get a general idea of what it is about. In skimming you ignore the details and look for the main ideas.

Main ideas are usually found in the first sentences of each paragraph and in the first and last paragraphs.

It is also useful to pay attention to the organisation of the text.

Skimming a text for gist can help you formulate questions to keep you interacting with the text.

Skimming to get an overall impression.

• Skimming is useful when you want to survey a text to get a general idea of what it is about. In skimming you ignore the details and look for the main ideas. Main ideas are usually found in the first sentences of each paragraph and in the first and last paragraphs. It is also useful to pay attention to the organization of the text.

• you can skim a text using first lines of paragraphs, first and last paragraphs, section headings.