Hello, this is Cecilia. Reading and making sense of large quantities of text is difficult without efficient reading strategies. And in this video, I will talk about some ways of approaching new texts. First of all if you understand the anatomy of a text, it's much easier to read it. In other words knowing how scholarly books and articles are structured, how different parts of the text are related and what their functions are will help you access what might be complex arguments. Book volumes such as monographs and edited collections have tables of contents and often indexes. If you start by looking at these, you will get a quick idea of the contents of the work. Then scan the introductory chapter of the book where you will find a presentation of the main topic and argument, as well as get an idea of the structure of the work. When it comes to scholarly journal articles, you can use a similar strategy. Although there will not be a table of contents or an index attached to articles, you will often find a short summary called an abstract and sometimes a list of keywords, which will help you get an idea of the contents. Reading the introduction of an article will also help you form an idea of what the article is about and what its argument is. Now, the kind of reading I've outlined so far is sometimes referred to as predatory reading. Predatory animals, like sharks and wolves, are focused hunters. And, in a similar way, predatory readers know how to first tackle a text in an efficient way. Let me stress, though, that whereas this reading strategy works well when you first approach a text, it's not a method to use when you are reading for in-depth understanding. In other words, depending on your purpose, you need to read texts in different ways. Predatory reading is the strategy to use when you want to identify central concepts and to get the first overview of a text. But in order to draw on a text in your own writing, you will need to read it carefully to make sure that you fully understand the argument so that you can refer to it and discuss it in an appropriate manner. This more in-depth type of reading is a type of close reading where you engage with a text on an analytical level. Close readers make notes or underline, they write annotations or comments to themselves about the texts they read. In short, they interact with the text in order to understand it. Engaging closely with a text in this way essentially means investigating various levels of that text. What parallels are there? How has the author chosen to present his or her argument. What references have been used, and in what way? Of course you must make sure you understand the text and how the author advances his or her argument throughout the text. Remember that non-native readers often need to read scholarly texts with a dictionary in hand. Even if we know the subject, we may not be fully proficient in the language used to discuss it. To sum up, depending on your purpose, you need different reading strategies from predatory scanning to get a quick overview to close reading for an in depth understanding of the text. [MUSIC]