Reading Skills for Higher Education

Academic reading skills are a discipline all on their own. It is very different from reading for pleasure or even the reading for learning you may have done in the past. The depth of understanding you will need is higher, the complexity of the language and ideas is more sophisticated and the amount of time you should expect to spend doing it is longer. In this blog we’ll discuss some reading strategies, then we’ll look at ways you can improve your accuracy and get the most out of your reading. Afterwards you will be able to apply your new knowledge to your studies, equipping you to confidently read for academic success.

Teachers in higher education settings have identified what they see as serious flaws in the standard of reading comprehension that their students demonstrate. Although this harsh criticism does accurately recognise a problem, this solution is focussed on the teacher rather than the student. As a student, you should take responsibility for your learning. There are simple steps that can be taken to improve your reading skills. The biggest issues with reading at university are finding time to do it and not appreciating how much reading is required to be successful.

So, what can be done about it? How can you improve comprehension skills? Or perhaps, how can you develop them from scratch? How can this seemingly insurmountable hill be conquered and integrated into your daily routine?

The most important step is to find time in your daily routine to read. How long and when in the day is entirely down to you. Take the time to decide when you can concentrate best, look at your timetable and identify suitable spaces within the week. Commit to this schedule and make your reading time as necessary and unmissable as all your lessons and seminars. Your reading time is sacred.

Where to read is critically important. You need to be able to concentrate properly on the text in front of you. It should be somewhere light and comfortable, a place where you can ignore your phone, television, and even other people. Again, it is up to you to decide what works best. But be honest with yourself. If you know you have your phone in your hand a lot, then perhaps leave it in another room. If you know you find noise distracting, then find a quiet solitary place to read.

So, now we have allocated time and have found the ideal place to sit. Reading is easy right? It can be. But the truth is that many of the texts you will be expected to read will be dense and full of academic phrases. Not to mention that in some cases they will be full of arcane and unfamiliar terms and perhaps even the sentence structure itself will be complex and confusing. You will need to develop a reading strategy to approach the act of reading itself. To be able to break down the text and fully appreciate what you are faced with.

A common misconception is that expert readers read quickly. This is often not the case. To begin with you should deliberately slow down and read at a much slower pace than you would normally. You need to take in as much of the meaning and nuance as possible. Ensure you have scheduled a long enough daily session to be able to take your time. A good way of starting is to skim the chapter you are tackling in that session and get a sense of how it is structured. What are the general points being made? What other works is it referencing? How long is it? Then break that section down into manageable chunks. Tackle each chunk in turn taking a break in between each one. You will find with training and practice that you’ll be able to concentrate for longer periods of time. But to begin with your strategy for reading success is to consciously slow down and take in as much as you can.

As you read take notes. This is perhaps the most important reading strategy in this blog. Make a note of any words you don’t fully understand, questions that occur to you as you are reading, or any turn of phrase or cultural reference you don’t appreciate to be checked on later. Your priority on this first detailed reading is to discern the authors meaning. But if the point being made hinges on an historical understanding or reference point you haven’t encountered before, then getting the full understanding the author intended will elude you. Ensure that you schedule time after your reading session to go through your notes and clarify any points raised during your first reading. This follow up is the key to translating your reading to academic success.

You’ve read and understood the text: now what? How does that inform deeper understanding and how do you apply that to your study or essay writing?

You should expect to read these passages at least twice to get the full benefit. View it in the same way you did with the advice to slow down. Once your comprehension of the content is clear it’s time to fully engage with the author. Don’t accept everything the author is saying to you without question. It is entirely possible, even likely that the next book along on the library shelves covers a similar subject using similar references and may make the opposite point to the one being made in this text. It is vital that you remain aware that it may be a subjective view. So how do we deal with this?

Well, you are reading, so you have your pen and paper. In our quest to read for success it’s important now to start interrogating the text, we must learn how to take notes from a textbook effectively. Ask the following questions as you read:

Asking and finding the answers to these elementary questions will reveal the depth of the author’s argument, your own understanding and help you to retain key facts and information. It’s also an opportunity to make notes of other texts referenced in support of the argument being made. It is vitally important that you understand the context from which that quote was pulled and perhaps even the larger argument and position of the author being referenced. You should also make notes of what seem to be the key arguments and central point of the text being read.

You’ve finished reading the text, congratulations! Now what? Don’t just file your notes and assume you will remember the information. This act of reading and research needs to be active and ongoing. Re-read your notes and rewrite them to ensure your understanding of the point being made. Discuss those ideas with other students or save them for discussion in your tutorials. Discussing those ideas with someone else who knows the text will give you another perspective and perhaps inform your next step. Ensure you always have your pen and paper with you. You never know when someone will say something that is pertinent. Write thoughts down when they occur and before they are lost into the ether. Then incorporate these comments and thoughts into your notes from your reading. Expand your understanding and through this process decide what you think about the texts and arguments being presented to you.

You are not a passive container being filled up with knowledge: you are an active participant and coordinator of your own learning. Take responsibility for it. The more points of reference you have the better informed you will be, and the better understanding of the core and fundamental texts on which your subject is built. Therefore, you will have better understanding of every subsequent work you read. Ultimately the importance of doing your reading thoroughly and successfully is to work out what you think about the subject. How do you interpret the arguments being made? What is the important aspect of the subject for you? What areas of research would you like to pursue? The answers to these questions start with the next section you read, understanding is built over the long term and requires organisation and a plan. It is a skill not an art.