Reading Academic Texts

Reading academic texts is a new skill that you will start practising when you embark on your university studies. This is not an easy task because a considerable amount of the set literature in most faculties is in English. If you are a beginner, you may feel that the English textbooks, academic articles and scientific reports are absolutely too difficult for you to read and understand. If you approach the reading task as part of your academic programme as a whole, you might find the task less formidable: it is only gradually that your knowledge of your own field will grow. As you gain in academic expertise, your skills in reading academic English will become more fluent. This kind of approach will help you get over the idea that reading in English is only difficult because you do not know all the words and because sentences are grammatically problematic.

It is important to see unknown words, grammatical structures and various conventions of Anglo-American academic writing as integral parts of the reading process. The problem with words, which students report as being one of their main difficulties when reading in English, must be approached not only as a language problem, but also as a more complex issue. When it comes to knowing and learning a specific term in an academic field, it is not enough to look up the Finnish equivalent in a dictionary, or to learn it from an English-Finnish list of terms, or to use a technique that you have used before in language-learning situations. Now you need to learn what particular ideas and meanings the terms are used for. You will do this in the lectures and seminars for your main subject, and also when you read your set books in Finnish. You will need to recognise the fact that sometimes there is no equivalent for a term in Finnish, and that sometimes the terminology is not fixed in either language. You might have to be prepared to do various searches, not only in a dictionary but also on the Internet. Or you might have to seek expert advice from the staff in your department.

Becoming familiar with the writing conventions used by most Anglo-American writers will help your reading of academic texts. These include organising the text so that the main points are expressed early on, repeating the main information, and using frequent explicit text-organising devices. Recognising the writer’s comments about how the text is structured and what the reader should expect next (commonly known as metatext) are aspects of a different writing tradition that may make your reading task easier. Coming across elements like metatext, repetition and reviewing, which Finnish texts mostly tend to avoid, might even cause you distress or make you doubt your language skills if you do not recognise them as a part of a different writing tradition. In conclusion, your reading process in English is only partly a language task.

One way of improving your academic reading skills is to learn to use reading techniques. These include predicting and skimming, making intelligent guesses (about unknown words and the content of the text), reading in stages, developing effective note-taking techniques, rereading and reviewing, and reflecting and writing about the texts. You can prepare yourself for the reading process by making use of various ways of previewing: skimming is a skill that you can easily practise with any text and that will make the subsequent more intensive reading easier. Skimming for the gist can be done fairly quickly by making use of the organisation of Anglo-American academic texts: you can learn to skim for the main points which are presented early and repeatedly, and you can learn to exploit the discourse markers or link words when skimming. It is often worth the trouble to spend time on looking at and analysing the list of contents of your textbook and its introduction. Again, this will effectively prepare you for the main bulk of the text.

Another helpful approach is to think of the intended audience. A Finnish undergraduate might not have been on the writer’s mind when s/he wrote the book! This means that the text refers to issues and sources that you just do not know about. Writers often explain their purposes and intentions in their prefaces, so reading these might help you to develop a good attitude to your reading. Again, what you are dealing with is not a language problem. Reflecting on these issues, and now and again focussing on just reading without worrying about language problems, might prove useful. Then again, you could create another type of learning situation for yourself by taking a section of your textbook and analysing it more thoroughly in terms of language: for example, you could look carefully at the introduction and the first chapter, and check the key words, which are probably related to key concepts in the rest of the book as well. One more reflective approach to reading involves writing. If you try and summarize the text in your own words, you will think about the content and might also solve a reading problem. Moreover, writing is a way of making your thoughts visible and thus developing them further.

Nevertheless, the most important thing for you is to develop a patient and persistent reading attitude, and to hold on to it. Surprisingly, psychological factors play a role here: once you have fought your way through one textbook you will find the next one easier to read. It is not always the best solution to go for the Finnish alternative in the degree requirements if the English writer is interesting and has a lot to offer in his field. Nor is it advisable to always rely on a Finnish summary written by fellow students. It is very likely that their interpretation of the book differs from what you might have come up with: reading is a process in which you look for meanings and give meanings. Reading is a process of interpretation with differing starting points and end results. Your motivation, of course, is crucial. Undoubtedly, the time available for preparing for a particular examination affects the relevance of certain reading material and the amount of energy you will put into your reading effort.