Does purpose, genre and speed impact reading?

Such textbooks might however be approached in careful detail instead, with the reader comparing multiple textbooks on the same subject so that a solid conceptual and theoretical understanding could be gained before attempting more challenging texts like journal articles. When approaching very academic texts such as these, a student might wish to become adept at skim reading the journal article’s abstract, introduction and conclusion first, making sure that a particular publication is useful for their research before analysing its complex statistical data and quantitative / qualitative analyses.

How does this impact a reader’s core reading skills?

From the above, it is clear that how a student reads will vary depending on their purpose for reading, the genre of source they read, and the skills that are being used to approach that particular source. As was discussed earlier in this unit, skimming, scanning and intensive reading are three commonly used reading skills that assist students when interpreting and dissecting texts. When reading a newspaper for pleasure for example, you might skim the contents of that paper looking for something that interests you. When reading that same source informatively however, you might scan the newspaper’s tabloids and specific articles instead, looking for the scores in a football game or the latest election results. Yet scanning wouldn’t be enough if you were to use that newspaper in your academic research. For this purpose, you would have to read that paper intensively and critically, determining appropriacy of the source, author subtext in terms of its content, as well as levels of bias or political affiliation. What this demonstrates is that your purpose for reading, the genre of the source you have, and the reading skills you employ are connected and must all be considered. 

Is the subject-specific context important?

In addition to the genre of text, what’s being described can also be a considerable challenge for readers. To fully understand a topic will not only require a wide knowledge of general-English vocabulary but also an increasingly expert knowledge of the facts, historical events and subject-specific vocabulary needed for that particular topic. While it’s of course true that the more knowledge a student possesses in advance of the reading, the better their comprehension will be, during some academic contexts such as examinations, there will always be some unknown information or words to deal with – and you may not always be allowed or have the time to check a dictionary or conduct online research. Ultimately, how you deal with such unknown subject-specific information will have an impact on the success of your reading. It’s therefore important that students develop strategies for what to do in these situations.

Does reading speed really matter?

One final factor that students often overlook in terms of reading success is reading speed. For the general public, speed reading isn’t necessarily an important skill. Everyone reads at their own pace, and unless you’re competing with a friend for how many novels you can read in a month perhaps, it’s likely that you’ll care little for how long it takes you to finish a particular book so long as you enjoy reading it. For university students however, reading speed is a more critical skill that must be practised to achieve academic success. There are five key reasons that you may wish to improve your reading speed:

1. conducting research
2. participating in lectures and seminars
3. succeeding in timed examinations
4. dealing with university correspondence
5. scoring highly in proficiency tests

Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of what reading means in academic contexts, and how purpose, genre, skills and subject-specific context are all worth considering. For more information about how to improve reading speed as mentioned above, continue studying with our reading hub or course library.