Study strategy: Academic reading

Brief description

This exercise helps students on the first two semesters, in particular, to use reading and writing in their academic practice. In the exercise, the students must reflect in group discussions on their own reading strategies. The exercise provides students with specific tools so that they become aware of and establish appropriate reading and writing strategies.

Motivation for the exercise and required outcome

The exercise can help to ensure that the students gain greater awareness of their own reading and writing strategies as well as alternative reading and writing strategies. By using the reading and writing strategy exercise either in your teaching or between teaching sessions, you can help the students to develop reading and writing strategies which can be used in their specific study practice.

Performing the exercise

Before the exercise, you as a teacher should spend about 15 minutes presenting the students with ideas about reading as a process consisting of:
- Pre-reading: What kind of text is it (genre, type, purpose) and what do I need it for?
- The actual reading: Reading must be adapted to suit the genre and type of text in question and the purpose of reading it. So the students can use various reading strategies (orientation, skimming, normal, intensive and selective). Explain the purpose of each strategy and when it may be appropriate to use them.
- Post-reading.: Processing the text. This may involve producing notes, summaries, models, mind maps, definitions of key concepts etc.
You might find inspiration in the slides which can be found on the right-hand side of this page.
After the presentation, the students’ reading strategies should be identified:
- The students get five minutes to discuss their reading habits with the person sitting next to them.
- Round this off in class – the blackboard might be useful in creating a clear overview of the students’ reading strategies.
The students team up in groups of two to four. These might be pre-existing study groups – unless you prefer to make the groups yourself.
Give the students two difficult texts which you have selected from the course work.
The students read the texts in their groups with a view to practising their reading strategies – they should focus on looking for the argument of the text.
They also make a list of the key dichotomies of the text and write a summary of the text.
The groups must hand in a written summary of the main arguments of the text (15 lines), as well as a list of dichotomies and/or key concepts.

Options:

The exercise may be used on a continuous basis so that the students can establish good reading and writing strategies. You may let the study groups take turns to hand in a 15-line summary of two syllabus texts for each lesson; these can then be used as a basis for reviewing the texts used in the teaching.
You can also consider whether you should expand the list of concepts/dichotomies each lesson so that the students eventually have a good, useful list of concepts from the course.

Activities

Examples of practice

Teaching plans

You will need:

You could encourage your students to read about active academic reading in Studypedia.
You can find inspiration in the following slides produced by a teacher who has used this exercise:

Download slides that a teacher has used (in danish)

Worth considering:

What reading activity and reading culture apply in the class?
How often do you want to use the exercise?
Should the exercise be voluntary or be included as short compulsory assignments?

Reading and Writing Workshop

Here is a concrete example of how a teacher has used the exercise in practice.

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Revised 09.10.2023

AU Educate