520R--Journal#4

Using English for Academic Purposes

This is a quite useful website for me because of the systematic information and various exercises.Just like the the title said, it is built for anyone who wants to improve his or her academic English on reading.

Several suggestions and reading skills for academic study are given by it based on two main goals: efficiently, and reading critically.

First, learning to read efficiently means we don't need to read every word of every book rather than read purposefully and interactively. Since we are going to enhance our academic reading in English so that our purpose has already decided the way we read. Usually we know why we are reading because we have a question to find the answer from the text in daily life.The methods will be different from reading a fashion magazine to reading a literature novel and in academic reading, it could be more flexible because of the types of the article and also what we want to know from the text. In order to carry out our purpose efficiently, we should follow some advices. We need to scan the whole book or whole article to know the type of it first and also we can use the content or the indexes to find which part is what we need.Then skimming it to check whether it is really useful to us or whether it is relevant to our purpose. After skimming, we can start to read the specific information and the detailes.Sometimes we have to go back to check the structure of the article in the end. During this course which is considered as a two-way process, we would experience the interaction because as readers,we are active to get something we want, but not just be passive to receive information given by authors. It means we have to construct our own ideas about the subject by using former knowledge of the language and the understanding on the world. Therefore it is useful to try to remember actively what we know and what we do not know before we start reading and also find questions for helping our interaction with the author.

Secondly, it is also important to read critically. Since we are active readers that we shpuld evaluate the arguments in the text and then build our own arguments. To distinguish fact from opinion and look at arguments given by the author helps us to be aware of our opinions and assumptions nomatter it is positive or negative. Reading criItically also makes us know the writer's background and purposes of the article easily because every writer has a purpose for writing. At the same time, readers usually have purposes to read so that if we do critical reading for academic study which includes asking questions such as what controversies exist in this area mentioned in the article,is it appropriate to the argument or what is the writter's attitude towards the topic, it will be easy to build our own thoughts about the article.

However,I still need to do more exercises by following the methods to see whether it really helps me on academic reading because improving English takes time.