Dealing with complex academic texts

In my last blog post I mentioned that I’m currently working at Glasgow University on an intensive summer course. I’d like to report on a teacher training workshop I attended as part of this course. It was titled “Dealing with long and complex texts".

The workshop was aimed at equipping university students with the skills required to deal with the quantity and complexity of the reading materials they will encounter once they begin their programme of study. As many teachers who use Business Spotlight teach at universities, I hope that the ideas I present here will be helpful. You may already be using these approaches in your teaching, but here is a summary of some key techniques that students can use for dealing with long texts.

• Read the title of the text. What do you expect the text will be about? Activate your prior knowledge of the subject and “switch on your mind” to receive the information contained within the text.
  

• Generate your own interest in the text. Why are you reading it? What would you like to find out about this topic? Give yourself questions to answer while reading the text. Write them down if you wish.

• Skim the introduction. Were your initial assumptions correct? If not, give yourself new questions about what you hope to find out from the text.

• Break down the text into sections. Read the first and last paragraph of each section, for example. Does what you've read give you a good overview of what that section is about? Is this section relevant for you (from the questions you asked yourself before) or can you skip it for now?

• Locate visual representations of the information within the text to help you, e.g. diagrams, tables, graphs and lists. If your preferred learning style is through visual images, using such graphs and diagrams will help you to understand key points better.

• Skim the whole text and underline or highlight key points to come back to and read in more detail later.

• When reading for detail, take notes using mind maps, lists, tables or other visual tools. Return to your notes at the end and use them to try to reconstruct the main ideas of the text.

• Set yourself a time limit for all these activities and learn to recognize when you are becoming bogged down in detail and are no longer receptive to more information. For very long texts, take regular breaks, get up and walk around and try to process the information you have just read. Thinking about it from another perspective can often help to secure it in your mind.

• Learn to recognize different text types. Is it, for example, a description of theory, a case study or an evaluative report? How reliable is the source? This will affect how you deal with and interact with the text.

• Learn to read critically and to evaluate your own position or stance on the subject. Try to read between the lines if possible.

• Learn to recognize signal words that indicate the direction the text is going (e.g. firstly, secondly, finally, therefore, however, on the other hand, in conclusion, etc.).

• Recognize which words are typically academic and learn them. Nottingham University’s Academic Word List is an online tool which allows you to identify such vocabulary quickly and easily. This tool even provides a gap-fill text creator which allows you to test your knowledge of academic vocabulary.

In the classroom, it is not necessary to do all of the steps mentioned above with every text, as texts differ in both their nature and their form. Moreover, it will probably become repetitive and boring to perform the same ritual with every text you introduce in the classroom. Since there are many different approaches to dealing with long texts, our job should be to present these approaches to our students and allow them to decide which one(s) work(s) best for them.

Finally, it is important at the end of lessons to encourage learners to reflect on why they have done such exercises in the classroom. The reflection stage allows learners to analyse and understand the tools they can use to become more autonomous in their learning.