ReadingSkills.doc

Reading Skills
Introduction
Many university students find reading at the tertiary level much more challenging than the reading they did at school or for leisure. The material is more complex, and there's certainly much more of it!
This module aims to help you become a more effective academic reader. You'll learn a simple strategy for getting the most out of a book or article -- and for doing so as quickly as possible.
You'll also consider the important question of a writer's point of view. Being able to identify this point of view will help you assess the usefulness of what you read, especially for your own writing.
This module provides you with quite a number of interactive exercises. You must complete them to fully grasp the strategies taught, and to improve your own reading skills.
This module should take you about 6 hours to complete.
Objectives
By the end of this module you should be able to:
· Apply four reading skills -- overview, preview, inview, and review -- in order to select information to incorporate into your writing.
· Identify a writer's viewpoint, and evaluate it.
Developing reading skills
Since most the information you need for academic writing comes from written sources, you need to develop your reading skills to a high level of competence. Above all, you need to be selective and efficient in your reading. It is impossible to read everything written in your field, and unnecessary to try to do so.
An efficient reader is clear about her purpose for reading. Knowing your reading purpose will also make you a more selective reader. Selecting appropriate reading material, within a limited time, is essential because there is so much information readily available on any topic.
In this module, reading skills are divided into four categories: overview, preview, inview, and review (Buzan 1984, 36). We discuss overview first, since it is the first skill to apply when you are examining reading matter.
Overview
When you overview a book or article, you evaluate its usefulness for your purposes by looking through it very quickly to gain a broad view of its value. If you find it useful, you can go back later to study it in detail.

To apply the skill of overviewing effectively, you should:
· Examine the title page to check the author's name, the date of publication, the name of the publishing company, the city of publication, and the number of editions or printings of the book (this is sometimes an indication of the book's importance or popularity);
· If the article is on a website, check the site's URL and look for signs that tell you something about the article's background: is it from a reputable academic source?
· Read the preface or introduction to understand the author's aims, and to identify the book's intended audience;
· Look quickly through the table of contents and index (in a book) or the section headings (for articles) to identify topics and key vocabulary that might be relevant to your studies;
· Glance at the bibliography or list of references to assess the depth of the author's research; and
· Briefly examine any graphics to see if you can use them.
Although the components that comprise overviewing seem simple (even obvious), it is surprising how many students begin reading even a long book on page one and proceed to work through it page by page, without ever assessing its relevance. Even if a teacher recommends a book to you, you should overview it first in order to find relevant material as quickly as possible.
Activity 1
Preview

Preview follows overview and involves skimming through a selected section of text very quickly to locate relevant information. Effective previewing involves:
· reading the introductory and concluding sections of a whole book or relevant chapter;
· reading headings and subheadings, which function as signposts to help you locate needed information;
· reading the first and last paragraphs of a section of a book or chapter of a book (the first paragraph is likely to give an overview of the text, and the final paragraph will probably provide a summary or review of the main points discussed);
· reading the topic sentences of the paragraphs in the text you're examining (topic sentences express a paragraph's main point).
Previewing a book or article is aided by the expectations created in the reader's mind by the title and any headings in a text. Titles and headings allow you to apply your knowledge of the world and of the topic in question to help you predict, understand, and interpret the text. The next activity gives you the opportunity to develop your previewing skills by using just the title to raise your expectations of the main points of a text.
Activity 2
As you learned earlier in our discussion of previewing, in addition to using headings to predict what a text will be about, the reader can make use of first and last paragraphs and the topic sentences of paragraphs to gain a fast knowledge of the main points of the text. The next activity gives you the opportunity to preview a longer text and apply the full range of previewing skills.
Activity 3
The next step in previewing the text on reading is to identify and read the topic sentence of each body paragraph in order to understand the main points being presented by the writer.
Activity 4
Inview
The third stage in our writing strategy is inview, which involves:
· returning to read in greater detail chapters, sections and paragraphs which you have identified as being relevant to your writing purposes
· reading more slowly than you did in the previewing stage since you need to note the details and examples which the author uses to support his or her main points.
Activity 4 above gave you the opportunity to identify main points in the text on the way Chinese people read. The next activity asks you to return to the same text, this time to note down important details and examples which support and illustrate the main point.
Activity 5
Review
The fourth and final stage of our four-part reading strategy is review. Review involves the following actions:
· checking areas of the reading not yet dealt with fully, e.g. particular sections of a text or even a small section of a paragraph
· reading again, in a concentrated way, the parts of the text you have selected to ensure that they really are relevant for your purposes
· completing your notes, which you started to take in the inview stage.
I want to advise you here that the length of some academic texts in English can be very daunting for non-native speakers. So, it is a good idea to divide or 'chunk' your reading into small sections and apply review continuously to check your understanding as you read through a text.
The text in Activity 6 below is interspersed with six questions to help you understand the ideas as you read rather than waiting until the end. The first three questions aim to improve your prediction skills by getting you to ask yourself questions before reading a manageable chunk of text. You then read to find out if your prediction was correct or not. The other three (review) questions will help you understand main points in the text after reading certain chunks of it.
Activity 6
In this section we have discussed the skills which combine to form a powerful overall reading strategy. However, it may not be necessary to follow this strategy through all its four stages. When overviewing and previewing you may locate the information you need very quickly, in which case, of course, there will be no need to go through the other two stages. On the other hand, you may find yourself at the review stage still with a considerable amount of information to note down. Having a complete strategy at your disposal will help ensure that you give yourself the best possible chance of selecting material from reading input of relevance to your purpose.
The next activity gives you the opportunity to check your understanding of the four-stage strategy we have discussed.
Activity 7
Critical reading: identifying a writer's viewpoint
Much of the reading you do in your studies will be presented in an apparently neutral way; that is, the writer will not display his or her biases explicitly. However, writers can communicate their points of view in a number of subtle ways. These include the following devices:
· citing sources which are favourable to the argument being presented and commenting positively on those sources
· including facts and figures to support the argument being presented
· using informal ways of addressing the audience, e.g. we rather than more impersonal forms of address
· using persuasive elements of language, including certain adverbs (e.g. clearly, obviously) and impersonal phrases (e.g. it is unlikely that ..., it seems that ...) which state the writer's position on a topic.
I must warn you, however, that these devices should be used sparingly and very carefully. Experienced writers realize that if they used any of the devices too frequently, they lose their power to persuade and instead irritate your readers.
Viewpoint in your own academic writing
Now that you've had some practice in learning to identify the signs that help you identify a writer's viewpoint, it's time to consider why considering viewpoint is so important in academic work. The following presentation will explain this.

'Viewpoint in your own academic writing'

To make the rather complex ideas from the previous presentation clearer, I want you to attempt Activity 8. This activity offers you the chance to distinguish verifiable facts from unsubstantiated assertions and opinions.
Activity 8
I have explained at some length why academic writers are careful not to betray strong personal biases or make unsubstantiated or unprovable claims in their writing. However, viewpoints can and, indeed, are expected to be present in scholarly writing. Without the expression of viewpoint, a subject would not develop and healthy debate would come to an end. But I want to repeat that in academic writing viewpoints must be supported by evidence of some kind. So, we can now elaborate the two-way concept of distinguishing between fact and opinion (as presented in Activity 9 above) to arrive at a three-way formulation as defined below:
Opinion
Supported viewpoint
Verifiable fact
a statement of subjective belief which is not open to verification and which is notsupported by reference to previous research
a statement which, while not open to absolute verification, is based on a consideration of all available evidence and which is supported by reference to previous research
an objective statement the truth of which may be demonstrated precisely by experimentation and which may be confirmed independently by other researchers
The ability to distinguish among these three categories in the material you read (that is, to become a critical reader), is a complex but important skill. Critical reading skills can only be improved through practice. To become a good critical reader, you also need to become a thoughtful and prolific reader!
In this section, we discussed the development of important reading skills as they relate to detecting author viewpoint and the way writers construct arguments. These skills are global; that is, they apply to the reading and interpretation of whole texts.
Conclusion
Academic writing poses many challenges to university students. Knowing how to read effectively -- especially how to judge the relevance of a book or article, and how to extract its useful information -- will serve you well in any course of study you pursue.
I hope you have enjoyed this module's introduction to these essential skills.