Part Two: Your personal reading journal

In Part One of these materials we studied some of the skills you need to deal with academic texts. In particular, we looked at:

• quickly deciding if a text is useful
• avoiding dictionaries
• ignoring unknown words
• setting our own questions
• reciting what we have learner
• guessing the meaning of unknown words

The skills are quite simple, but you need to practise them as much as possible. This will be done by starting a personal reading journal. This is a record of the reading you do outside class. You should keep a record of the following:

• The date
• The title of the text you chose
• The web-site address
• What you looked at to decide that the text was suitable
• The questions you set yourself
• The answers you found
• The new words you focussed on
• Any further comments you have

Try to read at least three texts each week, but the more you do, the better your reading and vocabulary will become. This is your responsibility.

As you really need to understand the text before you can study the language in it, it is best to do the reading activities before the vocabulary ones.