Table Of Contents
Promoting effective reading
The following notes assume that you are likely to be using MUSO 
to provide your students with online information and resources for your subject.
Among the language skills, reading has priority for a student because:
- The written word is the fundamental medium of the academic enterprise.
- Reading is a private activity, under the student's control.
- The student reads to prepare her/himself for listening, speaking and writing in lectures and other classes.
Research evidence ( Bayliss & Raymond, 2004; Kerstjens & Nery, 2000) indicates that NNS students' reading ability in English can be a significant predictor of their success in academic study (one study finds this to be particularly true for Chinese students).
Virtually all of the reading we do in universities is reading for a particular purpose – and there's a great deal of it to do. We read more efficiently by skimming through texts (books, journals, articles, webpages) to get an overview of their structure and content, and/or scanning the pages (or the screen) for particular items of information.
Reading as it is still commonly taught in many EFL classrooms, in China and in other countries, however, is aimed at a different purpose: that of teaching and learning the English language through close analysis of vocabulary and sentence structures – the 'grammar-translation' method.
Unfortunately,
[t]hese methods fail to promote extensive reading skills and [at worst] can even help to fossilize poor reading styles, thus hindering students from ever reading efficiently…. Because students are taught to focus on each word in a text and to examine the text carefully for any unknown grammatical phenomenon, they often miss the thread of the argument, the relationship between the parts of a text, and the text’s main idea….— Fang & Warschauer, 2004, p.302
Of the Chinese students interviewed for this project, all indicated that the volume of reading they had to do for their courses here was a major difficulty for them. Most of those who use the techniques of skimming and scanning say they learned about them during their IELTS preparation training, or in an ESL or bridging course they took in Australia before starting their degree studies. A few have developed strategies of this sort from their own experience. Some find them useful, but not all do – particularly where there is a lot of new vocabulary to cope with.
It's a lot.
Now this school [inaudible] to go and find relevant materials; so first I look at the introduction [? = abstract] of each paper to see if it contains material I need. Then having narrowed down the range, I read the full papers.
Basically it's something I learnt from experience!
At first I would read each paper right through; but in time I found that was impossible, and gradually adjusted my approach.
I haven't used them! – Maybe other people find them useful.
I just keep reading. But I read so slowly! And there's so much I don't understand.
But if you don't understand what you're reading those techniques don't help you.
I don't look up every word; but if you don't look up the words you've got no hope of understanding, particularly with the specialist vocabulary.
At the beginning my reading speed was extremely slow. So when you're reading every week it was a real headache, reading day in, day out, prescribed readings, journals; then before you've finished the reading you have to go to class.
No. Because now there is so much specialist terminology you have to look up in the dictionary as you read; it is a process which you can master; when you've been through it you are able to recall them as you read, and when you re-read it gets faster. Perhaps in due course you can use the technique of just reading the beginnings and ends of paragraphs, because the details in the middle of paragraphs are usually summarised in the beginnings and ends. That technique works fairly well for books, but not with journal articles. If you don't do a close reading of journal articles you haven't a hope of understanding.
Specialist journals use far more technical language. Textbooks give you far more examples; they discuss them in much more everyday terms, so they are easier to understand.
[…]
No – just read the whole. Because for one journal we should read it three or five times, and then after that we can understand it.
This is not the skimming and scanning things; because every sentence we should read it lots of times and then we can know what does it mean. Sometimes you know every words, but you don't know [i.e. understand] the whole sentence. This is very difficult.
Language and its context of use are inseparable. Failure to comprehend often has as much to do with lack of relevant background knowledge as with vocabulary limitations or the unravelling of convoluted syntax ( Adams & Collins, 1979; Kintsch, 1988; Pritchard, 1990). Contextualisation is vital, especially for people coming from a different culture.
It is up to the students to improve their own reading skills, but the teacher can assist them in this in at least three ways:
- by providing resources to assist students in managing the reading load as efficiently as possible:
- by modelling reading in class; and
- by stimulating students to demonstrate their reading skills in written form, and providing appropriate feedback.
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Yes. They’ve taught skimming and scanning sort of things and for me first, I would start reading the abstract and some of the introduction and conclusion of article and I can kind of get some idea, what can I use from this academic article. Then if this is useful for me I would do further reading and do proper reading for this one. So that was my skill.
This wasn’t such a problem for me, because my reading speed was fairly quick. But the amount of reading we had to do was too great, and sometimes I couldn’t manage it all.
I’ve done both the TOEFL and the GRE, and a number of English tests, so I’ve learned a bit about skimming and scanning; and my reading speed is quite good.