Study Skills in English PDF

# STUDY skills in English ## A course in reading skills for academic purposes ### **Michael J. Wallace** **Contents** - Acknowledgements - To the Student - To the Teacher **Unit 1: Improving reading efficiency** - Read more actively - Read in a more focused way - Read in a more time-efficient...

# STUDY skills in English ## A course in reading skills for academic purposes ### **Michael J. Wallace** **Contents** - Acknowledgements - To the Student - To the Teacher **Unit 1: Improving reading efficiency** - Read more actively - Read in a more focused way - Read in a more time-efficient way - Read with greater understanding - read more critically **Active reading** - Reading with a purpose - Task 1: Reasons for reading - Think of as many reasons for reading a book as you can - Which of them would you describe as academic reasons? - Is there any connection between your purpose in reading a book (or an article) and the way you read it? Should there be? - Predicting: study the title - Using the title: Read the information below, and then do Task 2. - The titles of books or articles can be very helpful to you, if you want to read in a more focused and efficient way. Usually, the titles of academic books or articles are factual and informative: they can almost be taken as very brief summaries of the contents of the text. So you can help focus your reading by asking yourself questions like: - In what way is this text relevant to me, or to what I'm trying to do? - What sort of questions do I expect this text to answer? - Anticipation questions - Titles can be helpful, too. Sometimes when you are reading through a bibliography, you have to make a decision - on the basis of the title alone as to whether a book or article is going to be helpful to you. Here, too, you have to ask yourself questions like those above. - Task 2: Using titles of texts - This task practises anticipating the content of a text by reading the title. - Choose three of the following titles from the journal Geography and, for each title, write down two anticipation questions that the article might answer: - _Global warming and extreme weather: a cautionary note_ (By Greg O'Hare. Geography, Vol. 84(1), Jan. 1999, pp 87-91.) - _Six billion and counting: trends and prospects for global population at the beginning of the twenty-first century._ (By Hazel Barrett. Geography, Vol. 85(2), April 2000, pp 107-120.) - _Unconstrained growth: the development of a Spanish tourist resort._ (By John Pollard and Rafael Dominguez Rodriguez, Geography, Vol. 80(1), Jan. 1995, pp 33-44.) - _Age concern? The geography of a greying Europe._ (By Stephen Jackson. Geography, Vol. 85(4), October 2000, pp 366-369.). - _Changing responses to water resource problems in England and Wales._ (By Rick Cryer. Geography, Vol. 80(1), Jan. 1995, pp 45-57.) - If you are in a group, compare your anticipation questions. How much overlap was there in the kind of information the members of the group expected? - Now look at the outline summaries of the articles in the Key. How good were you (individually or as a group) at anticipating the sort of information the articles would contain? - Skimming, scanning and searching - Efficient readers do not always read every word. To save time, they use techniques like skimming, scanning and searching. - When we skim through a text, we are reading it quickly to get an overall impression of the text. - When we are scanning or searching a text we are looking for specific information which we know, or suspect, is there. - Skimming - Another useful way of building up anticipation, so that you can ask yourself the right kind of questions, is by skimming through the text. Whether the book is a set text or borrowed from a library, thin of it as a tool for learning that is supposed to help you to master your subject. In that respect, you may want to know the answers to: - How useful is this book and in what way? (Evaluation) - Where is the information I need located in it? (Orientation) - The parts of a book that may be useful for evaluation and orientation: - Reviewers' comments (often also found quoted on the book-jacket; but remember, only good reviews will be quoted!) - Foreword or preface - Contents page - Printing history (This shows when the book was first published, reprinted or a new edition issued - usually printed on a page called the imprint page, immediately after the tile page.) - Index (A careful look through the index should also tell you a lot about the content of a book - we will be discussing the index the next section.) - Task 3: Evaluating the potential usefulness of a text - This task gives you some practice in evaluating the possible usefulness of a book and finding your way around it. The extracts on the pages that follow are taken from a book called _The Psychology of Happiness_ by Michael Argyle. See if you can use this information to find out more about the book. **Unit 2: Note-taking skills** - Take notes from lectures and similar learning resources in an efficient and effective way - Store notes efficiently - Exploit your notes for successful study **Exploiting learning resources** - In Unit 1, looked at one of the most useful resources for learning, namely reading materials, such as books and journal articles. But these are not the only learning resources that are available to students in higher and further education. - Task 1: Prioritising learning resources - Apart from reading materials, what other resources for learning can think of? Make a list, then see if can put them in their order of importance for you. - Note-taking - Whatever learning resource you use, you will probably want to note down important points from what you read or hear, either at the time or shortly afterwards. This is why most of this unit will be devoted to discussing efficient and effective ways of taking notes. - Task 2: The purpose of note-taking - Why do we take notes? Is it only as an aid to our memory? Are there other reasons for taking notes? Should we take notes in different ways for different purposes? What use should we make of notes when we have taken them? - Different ways of recording information - There are different ways in which information can be recorded. In the next task some of them will be listed. Make a note of the advantages and disadvantages of each mode.