Table Of Contents
Modelling reading in class
For many students from China and elsewhere, reading for their courses, particularly at the beginning of their studies here, has been a slow, painful process of starting at the beginning of a text and working through it, piecing it together word by word, sentence by sentence… then going back to the beginning and re-reading, once, twice, three more times, to gradually build up an understanding of it.
Is that how you read a new book or paper? Or is your technique, perhaps, something more like the following:
- Look at the title, the name(s) of the author(s)
- Read the abstract, if there is one (in an edited book, scan the introductory chapter for summaries of the various paper in the book)
- Skim through the list of references to get a sense of what is there
- Skim through the text looking at chapter/section headings and subheadings; tables, diagrams and other illustrations and their captions
- Read the introduction and the conclusion
- Read with attention those sections of the text that seem relevant to your purpose, underlining, highlighting and/or annotating as appropriate
- Make written notes and/or an outline of the text
- Enter the bibliographic details in EndNote™
or an equivalent resource.
To demonstrate in a lecture or tutorial how you read a text can be quite a revelation to some students. As we've seen above, not all of them will adopt such techniques, but more will be encouraged to try them out, and those who can are likely to benefit from doing so.
At the same time, modelling your own reading practice offers you an opportunity to point out to students the generic structure of the text, which can be very useful if you want them to be able to write assignments using the same or a similar structure. It gives them, too, an opportunity to ask such questions as "What is the difference between the abstract and the introduction of an article?"
For example:
- (Abstract)
- Introduction
- Literature review
- Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Conclusion
And, of course, it gives you an opportunity to demonstrate and discuss what you mean by a critical approach to reading – how you practise it, and what you expect of them in their reading.
Download a printable version of this page (.doc ~10Kb)Problems? Questions? Comments? Please provide us feedback.
Asked what special techniques she uses for reading, she replies, "I don't sleep"! – and talks of using her dictionary. When she comes across words she doesn't know, she looks them up in her dictionary; she seems to be aware that this is not the recommended method, but this is what she is used to doing. She reads and rereads until she has a clear idea what the topic is about, which is quite time-consuming. She had no idea how to do skimming and scanning – she thought everything was important.