Reading - time for introduction

It's time to begin the journey with my second support group, the Academic Reading group. This one is completely online, so I won't be meeting anyone personally and I can do the tasks given to us on pretty much any day of the week – whatever suits me the best.

For our first task, we had to introduce ourselves and talk a bit about our experiences when it comes to reading academic texts. Here is my introduction:

Hello! My name is Saara and I'm a second-year Geography student, majoring in human geography and minoring in media and communication. They require me to use a lot of English, both to write and to read, and I'm also thinking about writing my bachelor's degree in English, which is why I want to get as much experience as possible.

A lot of the course books in Geography are in English, so I'd say that I'm somewhat used to reading academic texts. However, it does take me considerably longer to read and to comprehend them than it would take if they were written in Finnish. Obviously, it's because I must translate them, but I also wonder if it's because the pacing too, is naturally different.

Usually, I start my reading process by skimming through the text, checking the intertitles and the length of it. Depending on the importance of the text, I'll go back and read it from start to finish or I'll just browse through it. I do always read at least the abstract with thought because it usually gives me a good glimpse of how the rest of the text will be. And to support my process, I most of the times take notes as well.

My main goal is to widen my academic vocabulary because I believe it will directly affect my reading process. Knowing more words will make reading more comfortable and hopefully also give me the confidence to tackle longer and harder texts.

After writing our introductions, we had to watch two videos that spoke of different reading techniques. The new one for me was PQ4R, which is a technique fit for longer texts when you really want to read it from start to finish – in a way that will make sure you internalize everything. I went back to the article I read for the Academic Writing support group, and applied this technique to it, just so I could see if it would make any difference. I must say, that since I already had read the article, it perhaps wasn't as useful as it could've been, but I still felt like it helped me to understand somethings better.

The other techniques were skimming and scanning, both of which I have used before without knowing that they are actual techniques. The task was the use them on articles found on Google Scholar, and I will put out my experience down below.

As for this week's activities, I already have read a longer article for the Academic Writing support group and so I went back to that to see whether I could apply the PQ4R technique to it. The article was David SG Thomas's (2022) "Geography needs science, science needs Geography" and after going through it again, I do agree that using PQ4R helped me to get a better understanding of it. Pausing between paragraphs and questioning what I've just read is something I should probably do more often, just to make sure that I've actually internalized the context. However, it's a quite time-consuming technique, so I would reserve it only for important texts.

I didn't think skimming and scanning were actual techniques, because that's quite literally what I always do with any academic text. They're both very good techniques to get a feel of a text, all without putting too much time to it, which is why I use them. I do, of course, also read texts from start to finish, but for the sake of efficiency, I am picky about them.

I skimmed and scanned through a couple of articles, some on Google Scholar and some just on random article libraries that I could find on the internet. Most articles on Google Scholar were very long so I focused on reading just the abstract and the conclusion of each article, but I also checked through the references and scanned the rest of the article for anything that could catch my eye. Outside of Google Scholar, the articles I found were much shorter, so I thought using skimming and scanning was pretty pointless.

Lastly, we had to comment on others' introductions. I left comments on three posts that I chose based on them speaking of similar experiences. We could, you know, offer each other some peer support, but we'll have to see if they will answer me, since answering wasn't required.