So, what do we mean when we talk about college-level reading skills? The answer varies depending on the context, but several core reading abilities and some specific techniques seem particularly common. 

The list below was created in consultation with Carleton faculty from a wide variety of disciplines. It is by no means comprehensive, and not all of these skills will be equally useful in all disciplines (and certainly not for every individual reading task you assign in your classes). However, it should provide a useful starting point to help you identify and consider the types of reading you expect your students to perform.

Reading Literacy Skills

These skills represent specific reading techniques that students use to comprehend a given text on a word, text, and discourse level. While all of these techniques are common in academic reading, they’re not all useful in every situation, and some may be more fundamental to certain disciplines than others.

Close Reading

  • examining details of text
  • tracking connotation, denotation, technique, context
  • using detailed reading to expand your sense of the text’s meaning
  • identifying precise points in the text that convey key ideas or support your conclusions

Skimming

  • knowing where and how to find the most important information for your purposes
  • reading only parts most relevant to your purposes
  • using structure and contextual clues to guide your skimming
  • assessing whether you got what you needed, what you likely overlooked

Procedural Reading (i.e. Reading Directions)

  • understanding the overall goal or output of the process described
  • identifying the purpose of individual steps and required components 
  • tracking important words, phrases, and details in instructions
  • recognizing unclear directions and points of uncertainty
  • developing a sense of time and resources needed to complete a task/process effectively
  • applying general directions/procedures to specific situations
  • knowing what to do when steps don’t work as read
  • critically examining procedures–when they do/don’t work, how to apply/modify to specific situations

Contextualization

  • understanding relevant details of the author and publication context
  • considering how the context in which a text was written (including the intended audience for that text) might affect the text’s content, structure, and writing style
  • identifying ways that texts might influence and respond to each other

Evaluating

  • forming critical opinions as you read
  • resisting the urge to dismiss whole texts when you disagree strongly with individual ideas
  • identifying specific ideas and elements in a text that shape your reaction to it
  • articulating your responses constructively, (i.e. in ways that provide useful feedback to the author or advance the discussion)
  • reconsidering and revising your conclusions over time

Annotating

  • identifying ideas, passages, and points that might be useful later
  • developing–and consistently employing–an annotation system that works for you
  • using annotations for rereading, studying, and writing
  • never, ever annotating library books in pen (this is rarely a problem for students in 2024, but I still feel compelled to include it)

Rereading

  • returning to a text after discussion, lecture, and/or reflection
  • reconsidering previous conclusions, points of confusion, connections to other knowledge
  • making new connections between text and ideas encountered in other texts or in class discussion
  • adapting reading strategy to fit new purposes (e.g. looking for quotes to use in an essay)

Decoding

  • looking for textual clues that guide readers through the text
  • identifying ways reading confounds/confuses you
  • identifying and learning key terms
  • especially important for texts when the student is not the intended audience
    • texts written in different historical/cultural contexts
    • texts written for readers with different knowledge and/or beliefs than the student

Disciplinary Reading

  • knowing ways different disciplines write and read
  • identifying key genres (e.g. lab reports, literature reviews) and their conventions
  • understanding how disciplines use and document evidence
  • applying appropriate questions as you read
  • understanding methodologies, limitations of the discipline
  • learning and recognizing specialized terminology

Intertextual Reading

  • making connections between texts
  • looking for areas of conflict/congruence
  • understanding how connections add to your understanding or open new paths of conversation 

Gathering (borders on many other research skills, such as citation)

  • finding and curating sources through research
  • tracking trends/conversations in sources as you find them
  • evaluating sources as you find them, based on their usefulness to your project
  • tracking gaps in your sources, new questions raised by them
  • knowing when to stop, when to dig deeper, and when to shift focus

Metacognitive Reading Skills

These are broad approaches to reading that students need to internalize in order to navigate difficult texts and switch between different types of texts and academic contexts. Most if not all of these abilities are likely to be needed, in one way or another, for academic reading in every discipline.

Purposeful (i.e. Strategic) Reading

  • approaching texts with a sense of why you’re reading them
  • employing strategies that will accomplish this most efficiently and effectively
  • weighing these against available resources (time, medium, location, etc.) 

Adaptive Reading

  • understanding that different texts and contexts require different reading methods
  • adapting ways you read to fit the situation
  • changing your approach as needed if you get lost, stuck, or overwhelmed

Dealing with Uncertainty 

  • summed up as “knowing what to do when you don’t know what you’re doing”
  • identifying
    • conclusions you can make
    • things you can reasonably guess, surmise
    • what you simply can’t know
    • ways you might fill in gaps (e.g. asking questions in class, looking elsewhere)
  • accepting that partial understanding is not no understanding
  • identified by faculty as a sophomore-level skill
    • first-year students tend to wade into hard reading, get lost, panic
    • sophomores and above may still get lost, but don’t panic

Dealing with Ambiguity

  • accepting that the meaning of texts is not always clear or fixed
    • sometimes ambiguity stems from a lack of understanding on the reader’s part
    • sometimes endemic to text and context
    • often a feature, not a bug
  • identifying what aspects of the text are open to interpretation, how different interpretations might affect its meaning

Positionality

  • developing an awareness of your cultural assumptions and how they might affect your understanding
  • looking for cultural assumptions embedded in the text, using these to guide understanding
  • resisting the urge to judge texts and authors, uncritically, by your own cultural standards
  • looking for ways your cultural perspective might inform your reading, not just hinder it

Applying Skepticism

  • considering why the information in the reading is true
  • questioning the qualifications and contexts of authors
  • evaluating evidence behind claims
  • forming, tracking, and reforming critical questions
  • identifying and resisting one’s own biases

Independent Reading

  • forming your own conclusions about the text at hand
  • thinking beyond the reason a text was assigned and what your instructor expected you to glean from it
  • forming questions, connections, and ideas to raise in class
  • not assuming the instructor will explain everything you need to know in class

Endurance

  • accepting that reading is often hard work
  • understanding how to stick with  long/difficult readings
  • knowing when to take breaks
  • identified by many faculty as the skill most in decline recently