What is critical reading? What's the purpose behind it? Essentially, critical reading means reading in order to have a deep understanding of a piece of text. Critical reading is the act of analyzing and evaluating what you're reading as you make your way through the text or you reflect back on the reading once you're done. There are a number of critical reading strategies you can use to help yourself attain this type of deep understanding. By the end of this video, you will be able to use a variety of different strategies which will help you critically read a piece of text. For example, you could annotate the text by underlining important parts of the text, such as thesis statement, topic sentences, and important explanatory material. Another way to gain a deeper understanding of a text is to contextualize it. To do this, you could try to identify the historical or cultural context of the text and consider how this context is different from your own. You could also paraphrase, outline, or summarize the text in your own words once you finish reading the text. When you paraphrase a text, you put it in your own words, which could help you to understand difficult or ambiguous parts of the reading. Outlining helps you to identify the basic structure and main ideas of the text, while summarizing helps you to synthesize the material from the original text in your own words. Another critical reading strategy that incorporates many of these ideas into one is called SQ3R, which stands for Survey, Question, Read, Recite and Review. Reading critically following the SQ3R method helps you to read in an effective top down manor in which you first gain a big picture of the text, then prioritize which material you'll focus on in a more detailed reading. I'll walk you through this reading technique now. The first step in reading critically following the SQ3R method is just survey. The word survey simply means to examine something in a general way. You could, for example, climb a hill and look down on the city of Hong Kong. In doing so, you have surveyed the land to really get a general big picture. In terms of reading, surveying refers to a very short process of about five to ten minutes, depending on the length of the text, and understanding what the general topic is about. To accomplish this survey, you look for the various titles and subtitles that authors have added to written text, any words that have been underlined, any bold and, of course, any visuals. You look more carefully at the introductory and summary paragraphs of the text, as these two paragraphs contain key information that can give you a better understanding of the text. You also look at the topic sentences of each body paragraph. All of these will assist you to gain a big picture of the content and structure. Once you've finished this, usually you will write a quick one sentence summary about what you have found, beginning with the sentence summary with, maybe, this text is about, and you continue writing. Having gained a brief understanding of the reading, it's time to formulate questions. Questions are used, as many people find them useful in guiding their reading. It's often difficult to remain focused in your reading without some sort of guide, so questions help in this process. Creating them is not that difficult. If there are headings in the text you can begin by utilizing these headings and subheadings. These statements can usually easily be turned into questions. You can simply change the words used in these headings into questions such as what. Like what is a survey? When. When did this take place? How. How did one do a survey? If the text is shorter and there are no headings or subheadings, you could create questions based on the W-H questions in English, Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. After you've surveyed the text, you could jot down these questions in the text that would help you focus more in your detailed reading. The main aim of this step in the reading process is to simply focus your mind on the task. With your questions in mind, the next step is to read in order to answer each of your questions. Typically, many readers will focus on specific vocabulary words. Unless these words affect the meaning, you ought not become fixed on these at this stage. A good reader would wait until the text is understood before focusing on vocabulary. Each section of the text should be read with the aim of trying to understand the main idea. If there are new ideas that come to mind, you should write down new questions. Such questions are very useful for further inquiry. The most important thing to remember is to focus on the general meaning. Don't get bogged down on details or trying to memorize everything. Next, recitation. Recitation is simply a means for good readers to consolidate their learning. With so much information entering into your mind, you need to consolidate your ideas. This is normally completed at the end of a text or a chapter if you're reading a textbook. Here you review your questions originally written, and attempt to answer them. There are many different methods for doing this. You can discuss with others what you've read or maybe write a summary. When writing a summary, try to do so from your memory rather than going back to the text and simply copying what is written. Finally, you review the information. Reviewing is an important step in consolidating your memory and understanding a text deeply. One simple tool you might use is to review your reading with a mind map. This can consolidate your learning by helping you to organize the information in an easy and understandable format. A good mind map should display how each point is important and in relation to another. Well, I hope at this point you have a clearer idea of some of the different strategies you can use which will help you critically read a piece of text. Now go try some of them yourself.
