16 Critical Reading & Thinking
Active Reading
Have you ever read something so difficult, you felt like you still didn’t understand it after reading the sentence or paragraph over and over again? Or you felt like you had a glimmer of understanding while you were reading, but the minute you stop or get distracted by a text or dog barking, the idea is gone and you have to start all over from the beginning? Maybe you were reading a complicated scientific journal for Anatomy and Physiology, or a legal contract full of legalese and jargon, or maybe even a history book full of dates and places you have never been.
No matter what we are reading– fun, difficult, or very dense text– sometimes our brains will wander while our eyes keep roaming the letters on the page. It happens to all of us. Thankfully, there are some reading strategies we can use to help us understand texts, even when we are tired, distracted, or struggling to understand a new vocabulary.
You have probably heard of active listening as a great communication skill. When listening actively, you may show you are hearing and understanding what someone says to you by repeating it back to them in your own words: “Oh, I see– when you say ‘perspective’ here, you mean your ‘attitude’ towards class.” You may try asking questions as you follow along: “Wait a minute– you went where on Saturday?!” Or you may follow along by nodding and interjecting agreement words like “yep!’ and “that makes perfect sense!” Sometimes as an active listener, you may even pull in your own examples to support the ideas you are listening to: “I have experienced something similar, so I totally understand your point here.”
What you may not know is that you can apply the same basic skills through “active reading.” Often when we are reading and understanding what we are reading quite well, our brains make active reading connections so quickly that we don’t even notice they are happening. When we are reading something that is very new to us or more difficult to understand, our brains fail to make these quick connections and we may struggle with reading comprehension– our brains may even wander, and before we know it our eyes have scanned a page while our brains were busy making grocery lists. If this ever happens to you– Don’t worry! We can actually train our brains to make reading connections even with new and confusing texts that are chock-full of words we don’t know. And, with a little practice, our brains will complete these tasks more and more quickly!
Here is an example of active reading (sometimes called “think aloud”) that shows the work our brains can sometimes do very quickly, but that we sometimes need to break down and help our brains do step-by-step:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krt82omdB7M
Try it Out:
- Choose a difficult paragraph. You can pull one up from your other classes or search the library databases for something difficult. Or pick a passage from Shakespeare or Chaucer.
- Copy and paste the passage into a Word Doc and add extra spaces between the lines.
- Print it out and make notes as you read aloud, pausing to underline words you don’t know or make guesses about the meanings of difficult words based on context clues and word parts (the root words or words that sound similar).
- Take your time and really dig into the meaning of each sentence, and write up a summary of each sentence in your own words.
- Then, read the paragraph aloud to someone and see if they agree with your interpretation.
Hot tip: The trick to this assignment and all active reading of difficult texts is to “fake it ‘till you make it.” In other words, approach this with confidence– you are better at interpreting language than you may think, and if you jump right in, pretending you know what you are doing, you will be far more successful than you might feel at the start!
Here are some further resources discussing active reading: