What the Professor needs to know Academic Reading What the Professor needs to know

3. Outcome(s) of the Reading Assignment What the Professor needs to know about Academic Reading: Quick and Easy Tips 3. Outcome(s) of the Reading Assignment What should the student have accomplished by reading this? Gain information to apply to assignment. Hinge to other material from the class Apply what was learned 1. Pre-Reading/Sparking Interest Awareness of potential student problems with the text Context/Background Knowledge Vocabulary (crucial or unfamiliar) Visuals/Charts/Graphs Challenging organization 2. Reading Clarify Purpose of Reading Clarify Tasks related to Reading Highlight & Annotate Take notes Fill Out a Study Guide Answer Questions

How do I know which words are problematic?

Language Structure—Cracking the Code of Academic Texts Becoming an efficient college reader involves cracking “the code” of academic texts. This means learning the various forms and structures that are typically found in academic reading passages.

Vocabulary Lists When we discuss vocabulary lists, we are referring to the frequency of word occurrence in a given text.

Vocabulary Lists When we discuss vocabulary lists, we are referring to the frequency of word occurrence in a given text.

Potential Problem Vocabulary This can be best illustrated by examining a typical college text.

General Service List In any given college text, you will find that approximately 80% of the words come from the General Service List (GSL) which was created by Michael West in 1953. This list contains approximately 2000 of the most frequent word families in the English language.

Academic Vocabulary List From the remaining 20% of words in a given text, 10-15% will be Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) words. The AVL was developed by corpus linguists, Dee Gardner and Mark Davies and is based on 120 million words of academic texts. The list contains nearly 3000 word and within 2000 word families that occur most frequently in texts across academic disciplines.

Technical Vocabulary In addition to the GSL and AVL, students need to know the other words related to specific academic subjects.

Vocabulary Example The following example illustrates how the words and their percentages match up with a sample passage. Words are color coded to represent which list they belong to: Black words are GSL words Blue words are AVL words Gold words are common in specific academic disciplines

Color Coded Sample Text This is an excerpt from a student success textbook. Quite a few of these words may be unfamiliar to some students. Research indicates that active involvement may be the most powerful principle of human learning and college success (Astin, 1993; Kuh, 2000). It could be considered the first base of college success because if it's not touched or covered you can't advance to any other base. This principle is the gateway to implementing all other principles of college success. The bottom line is this: To maximize your success in college, you cannot be a passive spectator; you need to be an active player in the learning process. The principle of active involvement includes the following pair of processes: The amount of personal time you devote to learning in the college experience, and The degree of personal effort or energy (mental and physical) you put into the learning process.

Color Coded Sample Text In this excerpt from a Biology textbook about 10%of the words are AVL words and 11% technical words specific to biology. Mutations are Important for Many Reasons One reason that mutations are important is that they create new alleles, which are alternative versions of the same gene. Some of these new alleles are “neutral” and have no effect on an organism’s fitness. Your reproductive success, for example, does not generally depend on the color of your eyes or the size of your feet. As unit 3 explains, however, variation has important evolutionary consequences. In every species, individuals with some allele combinations reproduce more successfully than others. Natural selection “edits out” the less favorable allele combinations.

Make Reading Active Connect a reading assignment with an active task: Answering questions Taking notes or writing a summary Writing a reflection based on an explicit prompt Participating in an on-line discussion with specific directions and topics Creating a visual artifact to represent the text