For short tutorials that guide students on how to read academic and/or complex texts, visit Excelsior's Online Reading Lab. Each module covers an important aspect of reading (previewing, questioning, annotating, paraphrasing) and offers strategies to deepen reading comprehension.
In addition, this activity, created by librarian Linda Miles at Hostos Community College, asks students to apply critical reading annotation techniques in order to develop a deeper understanding of an academic text.
Materials: Critical Reading Annotation Exercise-Instructions for Faculty (handout), Critical Reading Annotation-Instructions for Students, academic texts to be analyzed
Time: a single class period with additional practice throughout the course
Critical Reading Annotation Exercise by Linda Miles is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
This activity helps students recognize scholarship as a type of discourse that is distinguished by a unique set of conventions/modes of behaving. It also reveals they are learning how to participate in this conversation and recognize why citation is an important convention of scholarship.