German 604: Academic Reading Groups

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.

What you will learn

Both models will help researchers to

• be more efficient, active and critical readers in German
• be able to read, assess and process original academic texts at the respective levels
• be more confident in their perception of German academic texts

How to set up a reading group

If you already have a small group of colleagues interested in working together in a reading group for German texts simply write an e-mail to the German language teacher providing the names of the interested participants, their German language level and the text(s) or area(s) of interest.

If you are interested but don’t know who else might want to join the reading group contact the German language teacher providing your name, your German language level and your text(s) or area(s) of interest to see if there already is a group you can join or if there are other single requests that can be put together.