CRITICAL READING STRATEGIES

READING ACADEMIC TEXT

• REQUIRES FOCUS AND UNDERSTANDING

• NEED TO INTERACT WITH THE TEXT BY QUESTIONING ITS ASSUMPTION, RESPONDING TO ITS
ARGUMENTS AND CONNECTING TO ITS REAL LIFE EXPERIENCES AND APPLICATIONS
• HELPS YOU TO IDENTIFY THE KEY ARGUMENTS PRESENTED BY THE AUTHOR AND ANALYZE
CONCEPTS PRESENTED IN THE TEXT
 BEFORE READING
• DETERMINE WHICH TYPE OF ACADEMIC TEXTS(ARTICLES, REVIEWS, THESIS, DISSERTATION) YOU ARE READING
• DETERMINE AND STABLISH YOUR PURPOSE FOR READING
• IDENTIFY THE AUTHORS PURPOSE FOR WRITING
• PREDICT OR INFER THE MAIN IDEA OR ARGUMENT OF THE TEXT BASED ON ITS TITLE
• IDENTIFY YOUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE AUTHOR AND THE TEXT.
• STATE WHAT YOUR ALREADY KNOW AND WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN ABOUT THE TOPIC
• DETERMINE THE TARGET AUDIENCE .
• CHECK THE PUBLICATIONS DATE FOR RELEVANCE. IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED AT MOST FIVE YEARS
EARLIER THAN THE CURRENT.
• CHECK THE REFERENCE LIST WHILE MAKING SURE TO CONSIDER THE CORRECTION THE CORRECTNESS OF
THE FORMATTING STYLE.
• USE A CONCEPT MAP OR GRAPHIC ORGANIZER TO NOTE YOUR EXISTING IDEAS AND KNOWLEDGE ON THE
TOPIC
•
In The Dark
(10) Another advantage of speech over gesture is obvious: we can use it
in the dark! This enables us to communicate at night, which not only
extends the time available for meaningful communications but may also
have proven decisive in the competition for space and resources. We of
the gentle species Homo sapiens have a legacy of invasion, having
migrated out of Africa into territories inhabited by other hominins who
migrated earlier. Perhaps it was the newfound ability to communicate
vocally, without the need for a visual component that enabled our fore-
bearers to plan, and even carry out, invasion at night, and so vanquish
the earlier migrants.
(11) It is not only a question of being able to communicate at night. We can also speak
to people when objects intervene and you can’t see them, as when you yell to your
friend in another room. All this has to do, of course, with the nature of sound itself, which
travels equally well in the dark as in the light and wiggles its way around obstacles. The
wall between you and the base drummer next door may attenuate the sound but does
not completely block it. Vision, on the other hand, depends on light reflected from an
external source, such as the sun, and is therefore ineffective when no such source is
available. And the light reflected from the surface of an object to your eye travels in
rigidly straight lines, which means that it can provide detailed information about shape
but is susceptible to occlusion and interference. In terms of the sheer ability to reach
those with whom you are trying to communicate, words speak louder than actions.
Listen to Me!
(12) Speech does have one disadvantage, though: it is generally
accessible to those around you and is therefore less convenient for
sending confidential or secret messages or for planning an attack on
enemies within earshot. To some extent, we can overcome this
impediment by whispering. And sometimes, people resort to signing.
But the general alerting function of sounds also has its advantages.
When Mark Anthony cried, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me
ears.” he was trying to attract attention as well as deliver a message.
(13) In the evolution of speech, the alerting component of language might have
consisted at first simply of grunt that accompany gestures to give emphasis to specific
actions or encourage reluctant offspring to attend while a parent lays down the law. It is
also possible that non-vocal sounds accompanied gestural communication. Russell Gray
has suggested to me that clicking one’s fingers as children often do when putting their
hands up in class to answer a question, may be a sort of “missing link” between gestural
and vocal language. I know of no evidence that chimpanzees or other nonhuman
primates are able to click their fingers as humans can, although lip smacking, as
observed in chimpanzees, may have played a similar role. Sounds may therefore have
played a similar and largely alerting role in early evolution of language, gradually
assuming more prominence in conveying the message itself.
(14) For humans, visual signals can only attract attention if they occur within a fairly
restricted region of space, whereas the alerting power of sound is more or less
independent of where its source is located relative to listener. And sound is a better
alerting medium in other respects as well. No amount of gesticulation will wake a
sleeping person, whereas a loud yell will usually do the trick. The alerting power of
sound no doubt explains why animals have evolved vocal signals for sending
messages of alarm. Notwithstanding the peacock’s tail or parrot’s gaudy plumage,
even birds prefer to make noises to attract attention, whether in proclaiming territory
or warning of danger. Visual signals are relatively inefficient because they may elude
our gaze, and in any case we can shut them out by closing our eyes, as we
vulnerable to auditory assault.
(15) Speech has another, and subtler, attentional advantage. Manual
gesture is much more demanding of attention, since you must keep your
eyes fixed on gesturer in order to extract her meaning, whereas speech
can be understood regardless of where you are looking. There are a
number of advantages in being able to communicate with people without
having to look at them. You can effectively divide attention, using speech
to communicate with a companion while visual attention is deployed
elsewhere, perhaps to watch a football game or to engage in some joint
activity, like building a boat. Indeed, the separation of visual and auditory
attention may have been critical in the development of pedagogy.
Three Hands Better than Two
(16) Another reason why vocal language may have
arisen is that it proves an extra medium. We have
already seen that most people gesture with their hands,
and indeed their faces, while they talk. One might argue
then, that the addition of vocal channel provides
additional texture and richness to the message.
(17) But perhaps it is not a simply a matter of being better. Susan Golden-Meadow and
David McNeill suggest that speech may have evolved because it allows the vocal and
manual components to serve different and complimentary purposes. Speech is perfectly
adequate to convey syntax, which has no iconic or mimetic aspect, and can relieve the
hands and arms of this chore. The hands and arms, of course, well adapted to providing
the mimetic aspect of language, indicating in analogue fashion the shapes and sizes of
things, or the direction of movements, as in the gesture that might accompany any
statement “he went that a-way.” By allowing the voice to take over the grammatical
component, the hands are given free rein, as it were, to provide the mimetic component.
(18) But speech may have evolved, not because it gave the hands
freer rein for mimetic expression, but rather because it freed the
hands to do other activities. Charles Darwin, who seems to have
thought of almost everything, wrote, “We might have used our fingers
as efficient instruments, for a person with practice can report to a deaf
man every word of a speech rapidly delivered at a public meeting,
but the loss of our hands, while thus employed, would have been a
serious inconvenience.” It would clearly be difficult to communicate
manually while holding an infant, or driving a car, or carrying a
shopping, yet we can and do talk while doing these things.
(20) Thus, it was not the emergence of the language itself that gave rise to the evolutionary
explosion that has made our lives so different from our near relatives, the great apes.
Rather, it was the invention of autonomous speech, freeing the hands for more
sophisticated manufacture and allowing language to disengage from other manual
activities, so that people could communicate while changing the baby’s diapers, and
even explain to a novice what they were doing. The idea that language may have
evolved relatively slow, seems much more in accord with biological reality than the notion
of linguistic “big bang” within the past 200,000 years. Language and manufacture also
allowed cultural transmission to become the dominant mode of inheritance in human life.
That ungainly bird, the jumbo jet, could not have been created without hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of years of cultural evolution, and the brains that created it were not
biologically superior to the brains that existed in 100,000 years ago in Africa. The invention
of speech may have merely been the first of many developments that have put us not only
on the map, but all over it.
DURING READING

• ANNOTATING A TEXT CAN HELP YOU TO DETERMINE ESSENTIAL IDEAS OR INFORMATION, MAIN
IDEAS OR ARGUMENTS AND NEW INFORMATION OR IDEAS
 DURING READING
• WRITE THE KEY WORDS AND PHRASES ON THE MARGINS IN BULLET FORM
• WRITE SOMETHING ON THE PAGE MARGINS WHERE IMPORTANT INFORMATION IS FOUND
• WRITE BRIEF NOTES ON THE MARGIN
• WRITE QUESTIONS ON INFORMATION THAT YOU FIND CONFUSING
• WRITE WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW ABOUT THE IDEAS
• WRITE THE LIMITATIONS OF THE AUTHOR’S ARGUMENTS
• WRITE NOTES ON THE RELIABILITY OF THE TEXT.
• COMMENT ON THE AUTHORS BIASES.
• USE CONCEPT OR ANY GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS TO NOTE DOWN THE IDEAS BEING EXPLAINED
• REACT ON THE ARGUMENTS PRESENTED IN THE TEXT.
• UNDERLINE IMPORTANT WORDS, PHRASES, OR SENTENCES
• UNDERLINE OR CIRCLE MEANINGS OR DEFINITIONS
•
• MARK OR HIGHLIGHT RELEVANT / ESSENTIAL PARTS OF THE TEXT.
• USE THE HEADINGS AND TRANSITION WORDS TO IDENTIFY RELATIONSHIPS IN THE TEXT.
• CREATE A BANK OF UNFAMILIAR OR TECHNICAL WORDS TO BE DEFINED LATER.
• USE CONTEXT CLUES TO DEFINE UNFAMILIAR OR TECHNICAL WORDS
• SYNTHESIS AUTHORS ARGUMENTS AT THE END OF THE CHAPTER OR SECTION
• DETERMINE THE MAIN IDEA OF THE TEXT.
• IDENTIFY THE EVIDENCE OR SUPPORTING ARGUMENTS PRESENTED BY THE AUTHOR AND
CHECK THEIR VALIDITY AND RELEVANCE
• IDENTIFY THE FINDINGS AND NOTE THE APPROPRIATENESS OF THE RESEARCH METHOD USED.