Many thanks - and the first SIX questions on the text checklist would 
also make excellent ESSAY Question analysis tools!

John Hilsdon wrote:

> Dear All
> 
> Kate's original mail has stimulated some really interesting thinking and
> responses ... I have a few things I'd like to share... albeit in a
> rather rushed and fragmentary message - but that is partly my point ...
> 
> I'm writing this in a hurry, having read some of the responses to Kate
> very quickly (familiar story, eh?) Like most of you, I am dealing with
> the usual 'million things' that our lives in contemporary academia
> engender every day. In particular, the burgeoning 'in-box' of things to
> read and do - some more or less urgent - the largely - nay almost
> exclusively - electronic texts we are organised by.
>  
> I suspect that 'reading' has changed a lot for all of us over the past
> twenty years. I certainly read 'less' if I construct reading in a
> traditional sense - the way I used to understand it pre-internet. 
> 
> Some reading activities, differentiated by functions and contexts - e.g.
> in university study, in-depth, critical reading - may have (or seemed to
> have) declined, in part because of the sheer proliferation of
> 'information' we receive in mostly electronic and paper forms. But then
> reading for gist and relevance (a shorthand for a long discussion to be
> had some other time!) - for me at least - has increased massively... and
> reading in multiple contexts - hypertextually / intertextually has
> become a more 'normal' way of reading and perhaps is not well accounted
> for in our conceptions of reading ... being critical in times of
> supercomplexity (Barnett) is challenging!
> 
> Higher education, as we all know, has changed very significantly.  When
> I worry about students 'not reading' I remind myself of the fact that
> university entrants are not the academically focussed sixth formers of
> former times.  I think we need to beware of a tendency to blame or
> pathologise students for the 'ills' of our times. The massive pressure
> of 'information' is in reality the pressure of our social structure and
> how it operates. 
> 
> Students in HE are now about 50% of school leavers ... they read and are
> still critical - albeit under new strains and pressures. We can help
> them by encouraging questioning, and by facilitating an environment for
> concentration on an issue or set of issues/problems/questions by using
> texts. 
> 
> For in depth, critical reading we all need time. Time is one of the
> things we and our students feel is most under threat in our supercomplex
> lives. To encourage critical approaches, as several responses have
> already reiterated, we need to model questioning, and potential
> answering.  Back in the 1980s a school based movement called Language in
> the National Curriculum produced some really excellent materials. I
> still use a checklist from LINC and reproduce it here - in hopes I am
> not breaching copyright! I hope it may be helpful in stimulating
> approaches to critical reading.
> 
> I'd be interested in hearing if others use/modify it. It does not
> mention electronic texts, though remains valid for them - but it might
> benefit from some updating ...
> 
> Very best to you all
> 
> 
> John
> John Hilsdon
> Co-ordinator, Learning Development 
> University of Plymouth 
> Drake Circus 
> Plymouth 
> PL4 8AA 
> 
> 01752 232276 
> 
> [log in to unmask]
> 
> http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/learn
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: learning development in higher education network
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of C Neville
> Sent: 28 February 2007 10:18
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Motivating students to read
> 
> When I came back into education as a mature student in the 
> 1970s, I remember feeling thoroughly intimidated, 
> frustrated and angry at the academic texts I was expected 
> to read in the social sciences and arts. 
> 
> It seemed to me then - and still does - that too much 
> academic writing was dry and lifeless, obtuse and 
> unfathomable, exclusive, rather than inclusive.
> 
> However, I persevered with it, resentfully. 
> 
> Later I discovered Hudson's 1978 book 'The Jargon of the 
> Professions', which argued that the less secure a 
> profession feels about itself, the more excluding jargon it 
> spouts; Hudson singled out education, business & social 
> sciences at that time as the main culprits!
> 
>>From my work in learner support I know that many students 
> still feel thoroughly intimidated by the set reading, and 
> some disengage from it, or serve it back undigested and 
> unintelligible in assignments - a link with another 
> discussion on plagiarism is here, perhaps. 
> 
> I spend time with students now in workshops encouraging 
> them not to be intimidated by extracts like the one, 
> immediately below, taken from an academic text book:
> 
> "Garfinkel argues that the relationship between the act of 
> representation and represented object is dialectical not 
> unidirectional. 
> The character of the representation changes in the attempt 
> to explain the perceived nature of underlying reality while
> the object 'changes', in turn, to accommodate the language 
> employed to represent it. Representation, in other words, 
> is a dynamic, interactive process in which the 'actor', and
> the form of representation, that is language, 'constructs' 
> some at least of the reality under investigation" 
> 
> 
> In the workshop students try and work out what the author is
> saying. Eventually, and together, they crack the codes and 
> work out that this particular writer is trying to say that 
> it can be difficult to explain the nature of <LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION
> MARK>reality<RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK>,as 
> it depends who is talking about it, how they perceive it, 
> and the words they use to explain its meaning. 
> 
> They will then usually comment as to why the author did not 
> simply say that in the first place. 
> 
> Motivating students to read?  Let's mount a LDHEN campaign 
> to encourage more clarity, less pretension, and better 
> communication, in academic writing.
> 
> Colin Neville
> Bradford
> 
> ---------------------------------
> C Neville
> [log in to unmask]

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