How these sessions work
Apart from reading academic texts, the activities of a reading group include:
- general and language specific academic reading strategies
- controlled reading exercises, testing and reflecting different strategies
- linguistic knowledge and schemata strategies, meta-cognitive awareness
- working with dictionaries and corpora databases
- self-observation: how do I read (German) academic texts?
- observations, interpretations and discussions
There are two models for academic reading groups:
a) The researchers agree on a text they want to read together. In this case the focus will be on the specific text, its context and vocabulary, the author’s style, text interpretation and discussion, identifying and explaining difficult or ambiguous paragraphs etc.
b) Every researcher brings in her/his own text s/he wants to work on. In this case the participants will receive individual reading tasks and formulate individual reading goals. The participants will present short summaries of their text. The reading tasks and goals as well as the used strategies will be discussed with the group. Selected passages of the different texts will be analysed, interpreted and discussed with the group.