Tips for Teaching Academic Reading

Academic reading is hard for undergraduates not just because of unfamiliar vocabulary and content, but because the organization of the texts is completely unfamiliar to them.  Students, therefore, do not understand the organizational clues that indicate where major points are in the text.

Typical organization of a general academic article in the humanities

I.                   Story, example, or quote to frame the argument in the essay

II.                Introduction of the problem

III.             Literature review, overview of previous attempts to solve the problem

IV.              Introduction of the research gap, makes space for the writer's thesis

V.                 Thesis (often refers back to the literature review, e.g. “Although much has been done to demonstrate X, one factor that has been ignored is Y”)

VI.              Argument and explanation of thesis

Typical organization of an empirical academic article in the humanities or the social sciences

I.                   Story, example, or quote to frame the argument in the essay

II.                Introduction of the problem

III.             Literature review, overview of previous attempts to solve the problem

IV.              Methodology, often with an additional literature review to justify the methodology

V.                 Data summary

VI.              Conclusions and the writer's thesis

Notice that the thesis is usually far down in the essay in both of these article formats.  This is different both from essays that they've written in the past (since they've probably been taught to put the thesis in the first paragraph, or even in the first sentence) and from other kinds of nonfiction texts they've read (textbooks and magazines, for example, tend to have the most important points highlighted and often put in boxes or in numbered lists.)  Students, then, tend to see academic articles as rambling and lacking any point.  Or, they incorrectly identify the thesis of the essay, mistaking the summary of other authors' ideas in the literature review for the thesis.  

Part of this difficulty is also because the way sources are used in academic articles is different than what they are used to.  They have probably been taught to use sources to either find information or to support an argument.  Academic writers use sources for both of these purposes, of course, but they also use source material as a way to create a question, to ask themselves: “what has been done before, and how can I add something new to this?”  Because of this use of sources, professional academic writer's tend to read a lot of material before they formulate a specific research question; by contrast, student writers tend to go to the library with a research question in mind, and try to find sources that answer the question.

Therefore, if you want your students to use academic, you need to teach them about how these essays are organized and what the purpose of each of the sections are.  If you want them to write academic-style essays, you also need to teach students to use sources in the ways they are used in professional field writing.

Tips for teaching academic reading:

1.      Start with an empirical essay because the sections are usually clearly marked.  There are several journals about college life that print empirical articles that may be of interest to students.  The Journal of College Student Development has some good empirical articles that are relevant to students' experiences.

2.      Before students read an academic essay, go over the organization and the function of the different parts.  Have them scan for the location of the thesis and other key parts.

3.      Show students both how the writer uses sources and how they could use the literature review to find additional material on the same subject.  I often ask a series of questions to the class and have them find the answers in the text, before they've read it, by scanning the literature review.  For example, “If you wanted to find additional sources on X, which three of the sources the author uses would be the best?”  “Based on the comparison the author makes between these two sources, which one do you think the author likes more?”

4.      Encourage students to read the essay out of order, reading the introduction, the question, and the thesis parts first.  Sometimes, it is also permissible to tell them they can skip certain technical parts, like the methodology, if it is not relevant to the class or requires too much background knowledge.

5.      Have students find source on a topic before they come up with a research questions related to that topic.  Help them figure out how to create a question that comes out of the reading instead of using the reading to support an already existing thesis.

6.      Have students mimic the form of academic writing in class writing activities.  For example, you can have students in groups create an outline for a mock topic after looking over a made-up annotated bibliography on the subject.

 

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