Effective Strategies for Improving Reading Comprehension

Reading activity: Scenario 1 Reflections You have to write an essay on a topic that you learnt about over a month ago. When you look back at the main reading, you can t remember what the text was about and you did not make useful notes. You remember finding the corresponding seminar/tutorial difficult. Which of the below strategies could help here? 1) Use a mix of online and print texts/notes/formats to re-read the text and tailor your note- taking so that the notes relate to the purpose of the essay. 2) Use the word search function to search the reading for key words in the assignment question. Read those sections and make notes. 3) Use the hyperlinks in the main reading to access further reading which may help you to understand the main reading better. Learning Development at Lancaster University LearnHigher (Licenced: Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0)

Reading activity: Scenario 1 Strategy 1 promotes the best type of comprehension and understanding. If you take this forward as good study practice, it may help stop the situation from happening again. However, this approach would be quite time consuming and highlights the need for strong time management. Strategies 2 and 3 may be quicker and help avoid the text that you are struggling with. You may also gain some useful insights. However, you run the risk of: acquiring only a basic, surface level understanding of a text and missing key elements of an argument not fulfilling your assignment brief by omitting key texts or referring to them in a very basic way.

Reading activity: Scenario 2 You are reading a text for one module that you find particularly challenging. The module is very new to you and contains lots of complex language, which you struggle to understand. You keep pausing to look up definitions in an ap- propriate online resource and making notes, but you realise this is taking you a very long time and you still have most of the chapter to read. You also have two other texts to read for the module that week. What would you do? 1) Continue to look up words and make notes. You don t mind working late and feel it is important to finish the text. 2) Take a skim read of the three texts that you have to read by reading the abstracts, headings and conclusions. You decide that one of the other texts seems more introductory, so decide to read this text first. If you have time, you will return to the others. 3) Stop searching for definitions and copy and paste the sections that you do not understand into a word document, so you can research them later. Keep reading the text as best you can.

Reading activity: Scenario 2 Reflections In this example, Strategy 2 likely promotes the best level of understanding and is probably the most feasible. Strategy 1 may also promote your understanding but it could lead to exhaustion and you may not be able to read the other texts in time. Strategy 2 may help you to gain a basic understanding of the problematic text. Making notes of new words is key to your learning but the amount and level of detail needs to be compatible with your other programme requirements. Strategy 3 does not solve the issue, rather it puts it aside for another day, and may not en- hance your overall comprehension of any of the set readings