520R Journal #3

http://www.reading.ac.uk/counselling/studyskills/publish/study_resources/study_guides/reading.htm
http://www.canberra.edu.au/studyskills/learning/reading
http://www.studyskills.soton.ac.uk/studytips/reading_skills.htm
http://www.uefap.com/reading/readfram.htm

These days, I'm exploring and enjoying these websites. They are all focusing on how to improve your academic reading skills. Mentioning about this, in my opinion, improvement not only means reading faster, but also means comprehending deeper, recognizing more advanced vocabulary, and broadening your horizon on specific area while reading.

The websites I list above are typically for students, especially university students, because university students are supposed to come across more academic reading materials. No matter you are a native speaker or an oversea student, you need to have a certain amount of special training on academic reading, for academic reading requires more advanced reading skills than general reading.

In the websites, you could find a lot of useful reading strategies as well as a lot of tips. According to my comprehension, the most important thing that you have to remember is that you can't read an academic reading word by word. It wastes you time, wastes your energy, and makes you crazy about what the writer is talking about. Therefore, you have to use some specific skills. Like skimming, it can help you to understand the main point quickly; like scanning, you can seek for some information as soon as possible without reading the whole passage; like detail reading, it may help you to learn from the passage, some vocabulary as well. In a word, you must read an academic reading efficiently.

When you are reading an academic material, please use underlining, highlighting, notes-taking,and summarising. These methods could help you understand the material better and deeper.

You also need to select good reading materials and set goals before you read. That means you have to aware what you are reading mentally, and you must really learn something that you do not know before. That's what a university student ought to do at this time. Besides, you should have you own opinion about the topic after you've read. Do you agree? Do you have something unique to add? Thinking about these questions would help you gain critical thinking skills quickly.

Academic reading is an advanced reading assignment, it aims at the students who have received good education. Unavoidably, there are a certain amount of new vocabulary which are specific in some specific area that people do not use daily. In this situation, you should make full use of
your dictionary, but it doesn't mean you should look up every word you don't know, on the contrary, you ought to guess the meaning. Otherwise if it really makes you confused, you could look it up in the dictionary.

I strongly recommend every students should follow these basic rules, because they are accumulated by priceless experience. What's more, I want to add a point, that is, retell the material you've read in your own words. It can show whether you really understand the reading or not. Furthermore, it could help you practise your oral English. Since we're all oversea students, we should grasp each opportunity to enhance our ability.