It is never too early to start developing the academic skills that create a rounded, confident learner who is able to cope effectively and confidently with the many demands of study in today’s world. In this blog, Greg Archer shares his advice on ways to help teenage learners develop their academic skills.
Let’s face it, it takes a huge amount of time and effort to get to the point where you can, say, gist read and digest the main points of a text in the blink of an eye, or take notes that are actually useful to you when you later revisit them.
I am happy to hold my hands up and admit that, at many points earlier in my teaching career, I must have said to countless learners in innumerable classes, “skim read the text quickly and just try to get the main idea”. I would naively say this without giving them any guidance whatsoever on what skills they need to do so. Not a single mention of a single aspect of the academic skills required for effective Skim Reading. My bad (practice).
In my defence, at those points I was exclusively teaching adults, so assumed that they ‘should really know how to do that by now’, but this thinking is certainly muddled and misguided when it comes to teaching teenagers, who are very much a work–in-progress when it comes to such matters. As such, there is such a great sense of reward for a teacher to help them tackle texts more confidently, and with an increasingly sophisticated approach.
Developing academic skills can be fun
No, honestly, stay on the page, it can.
Let’s look at the inseparable twin of Skim Reading: Scanning. It’s a hugely important skill to have, particularly at university, when there are often huge tracts of text to read through in the search for a single piece of information.
I have found that the ‘little and often’ approach works well for teenagers, and you can quite easily bring on the development of their scanning skills during the first five minutes of each class. Divide your learners into pairs or groups, all of them hunched over their copies of a text that you have handed out, and see who can be the first to find the answers when you call out:
- a specific word
- a specific phrase
- a word that means ‘x’
- a paraphrase of ‘y’
- and so on
Keep score (teenagers love a bit of competition), and maintain a leader board over the course of a week. Remind them what they are doing, that they are practising scanning skills, but don’t labour the point, keep it fun.
One size doesn’t fit all
Differentiation is also a biggie. In the case of your more focused students, they will already be thinking in more concrete terms about study at university. When you advise them to proofread their work, they will probably proofread without dissent, complaint or a single roll of their eyes.
For other teenage learners, you will need to work a bit harder to convince them. Rather than bore them with advice like, “this is a valuable skill which you will need for your final exams and even more so at university”, put it in terms that a teenager will understand: “if you do this bit now it will mean you’ll have a bit less to do next week”. Or, as a last resort, “just do this now and I’ll get off your back”.
And for those young students who resist with every inch of their being the need to proofread their work, look at this strategy box from Talent Student’s Book 3. Think about how to repackage and personalise the below salient advice:
“Have you ever lost silly marks in an exam or a test? Have you ever ended up with a lower grade or score because you didn’t bother to re-read your answers and check your spelling?”
If you are able to find me a teenager who can honestly answer, ‘no, never’, we must put them on display in the Museum of Utterly Impossible Artefacts.
Academic skills in Talent
Talent is a three-level Upper Secondary course which combines academic and life skills with thought-provoking topics and the latest in language research – allowing students to “grow their own way”. Its skills-based syllabus helps students to develop the skills required for multiple exams, including IELTS, iGCSE and the Cambridge Suite.
To read more from Greg Archer, check out IELTS Writing Task 2: teaching writing skills to raise awareness of the marking criteria.