Books
Reading will form a core part of your study activity while you are at university and the university library will probably become as familiar to you as your own home!
Most of your academic reading is likely to involve books of various types as well as print and online journals related to your subject area. You will need to be able to recognise and use a number of key terms related to each type of literature when you are searching for reading material and when you are referencing your sources in your academic writing.
Check that you are familiar with some of these key terms and explore some of the different reading skills you will need by doing these two activities.
You will probably use the university library to find many of the books and journals that you need to read during your course. It may take you some time to locate a specific item book or journal especially at first but if you understand the terminology used to refer to different kinds of reading material the search will be much quicker.
Put these key terms into three groups according to whether they refer only to books, only to journals or to both types of reading material. Write them into the appropriate box. Then check your answers.
author | year | bound volume | edition | year of publication | article | ISBN | call number | index | spine | chapter | list of contents | issue number | abstract | current/back issues | periodicals
Books
Journals
Both
How confident do you feel about your reading skills in English?
Reading for academic purposes can be particularly demanding. This is because of the quantity of academic material that you will need to look at and, in some cases, read and understand in detail. Reading for academic purposes can also be demanding in terms of the varying levels of difficulty that different materials present.
Use this exercise to find out about the different kinds of academic reading skills that you are likely to need during your course:
Produced for the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics
and Area Studies Materials Bank www.llas.ac.uk/mb
Author: Julie Watson, eLanguages, University of Southampton
