Hello, my name is Emma, and today I am going to teach you how to read better.
So, when you go to high school or university
or even for work, sometimes you have to read
very difficult things in English. I'm going to
teach you a method today to help you understand
what you read better and remember what you read
better. Now, first of all, I just want to show you
how I used to read textbooks. So, this is a book from when I was in university.
What you will see is everything is highlighted.
So, I would take a highlighter, and I would just
highlight everything. Now, this is not a good
idea. It did not help me remember the information.
Instead, what I should have been doing is
something like this method, the SQ3R method.
So, the SQ3R method, many teachers use this
method when they teach, and it's a method to
help you read better. Specifically, there are five steps. The first step is survey.
The second step is question. These steps happen
before you read, and I will go through each of
these steps in detail in a moment. Then we have
the third step, which is you actually read.
Then the fourth step, recite, and the fifth step,
review. These two steps are done after reading
immediately. So, by using these five steps
when you read, you can understand a lot more,
and that is very important when you are reading
difficult books, especially if English is not
your first language. These tips can also help
people who English is their first language,
but they're just trying to remember more of
what they read. So now, let's get started by
understanding what you do when you survey.
The first step in the SQ3R method is to survey
what you're going to read. So, I've chosen
here a textbook I had to read in university,
Principles of Human Physiology. This was a very difficult textbook to read.
So, what you can do if you have something difficult to read like this
is imagine I'm looking at this page. The first
thing I want to do before I read everything
is I want to prepare my brain for the information.
So, I'm going to look at the pictures,
if there's any pictures, try to figure out what
the pictures mean. If there's any graphs or
tables, I might look at those. I will look at
headings. So, right here, I don't know if you
see it, but in green, there's a heading. It says structure at the molecular level.
I'm going to look at anything that has a heading
or a subheading, and I'm going to think about,
okay, what is this going to be about? What is this going to tell me about?
Another thing I can do is look at anything in
bold. So, this page actually has some writing
that's in bold, and there are some definitions,
so I might quickly look at that. The point is,
when I survey, before I read, I look at
headings, subheadings, bold text, charts, graphs,
and photos, and the point is to start to think,
okay, what am I going to be reading about?
It prepares my brain for new information, and
that's why I'm doing this. It gets you ready
for the actual reading you're about to do. This
should not take long, maybe a minute or two
minutes. It's a very quick thing to do. You're
just very quickly looking at what you're going
to read before you read it. The second step
in our method is to question. Before you read,
it's a good idea to create some questions about
what you're about to read. So, the way you can do
this is you can open up your book. So, here's the
book I'm reading, and again, I find those headings
or subheadings, and I can ask questions about
them. So, in this case, the first heading I see
says dating techniques, so I might ask a question. What are dating techniques?
Okay, and then I might look at another heading that says relative dating methods,
so I might ask a question. What are relative
dating methods? And then I see there is something
in bold, F-U-N TRIO. I don't know what that is.
I might ask, what is the F-U-N TRIO? What does it
stand for? And then I might look at this picture,
so you can see a picture here. I might say,
what's this a picture of? What does this line
mean? So, asking questions before you read
is a good idea. This is just one example,
but again, you turn whatever you're reading,
turn the headings into questions. What, why,
how, when, where, these types of questions.
And then, again, asking questions before you read helps you become an active reader.
And remember, when you're actively reading,
you understand better and you remember more.
So, now it's time to actually read. So, we've already surveyed the book,
we've already asked some questions. The third
step is reading the actual thing you need to read.
So, the first tip is read carefully. Take your time. You might have to reread parts,
and that's okay. And try to answer the questions
you came up with during the Q part of the SQ3R.
So, think about, remember you had questions about the subheadings and the headings,
you can, or some of the pictures, you can try to answer those questions as you read.
You can also look for key points in what you're reading. If you see a definition,
that might be important, you know, what something means.
You can look at examples, try to understand the main ideas of what you're reading.
And write down important information. So, remember
I showed you the book I used in my first year of
university. I used a highlighter and highlighted
everything. By my third year of university,
I'd learned. So, this book I had to read in my
third year of university. And what you'll see is
all these little tabs here. But I started to use
sticky notes. And so, what I would do when I would
read is I would read something, and then I would
write down questions, or I would write down key
points that I was reading, and I'd use sticky
notes. Sometimes I would actually write in the
actual book. Some people hate doing that, and
that's okay. Some people like to write in their
books, and that's okay, too. Whatever works for
you. But the main thing is you want to start
thinking, "What am I reading that is important?
What do I need to remember?" So, ask yourself
these questions as you read. Again, ask
yourself, "Is this important? Why or why not?"
There's a lot of information in these books, and some of it's
details that you might not need to remember. So,
it's a skill to learn what do I need to remember,
what's important, what should I take notes on, and what is less important.
One trick is if you're in university or
college, and your professor mentions an idea,
and then you see the same idea in the book you're
reading, it's probably an important idea that you
should remember. So, if you notice the professor
has said something, the book says the same thing,
that probably is important to remember, especially for a test.
You can also use the... In some textbooks,
there's a summary at the end of each chapter.
So, you can also use these summaries to help
you figure out if something's important or not.
So, I'm going to show you another book.
So, again, this was my physiology textbook,
and I don't know how well you can see it, but
at the end of every chapter, there is something
called a chapter review or summary, and it writes
all the key ideas that you should know that were
important in the chapter. So, sometimes reading
this can really help you understand what's
important and to make sure you didn't miss anything that's important.
So, read carefully, read for the main ideas,
and take notes while you read. This is how you
become an active reader. If you're just reading
without taking notes, you're probably going to
forget something. The next step in the SQ3R
method is recite. So, this is done after you read.
And what do you do? Well, imagine I've just finished the chapter, read everything,
now what I do is I close the book and I test
myself. So, I try to answer the questions I
had from earlier. Remember in the Q part, the
question part, we came up with some questions
based off of the headings and subheadings? Now I'm going to ask myself some questions.
What did I just read? What were some new words
that I learned? What does, you know, earlier I
mentioned the fun trio from that one book, what
does the fun trio mean again? So, I might ask
myself questions based off of what I learned. And
I can try to ask other questions. So, what did I
learn? What new words did I learn? What were some
of the key findings or key points that I just read
about? And I should quiz myself. Okay, I learned
the word fun trio. What is fun trio? Let me think.
Oh, okay, I remember what the fun trio is, just
as an example. I actually read that book a long,
long time ago and I don't remember anything about this fun trio. It's just an example.
The last R in the SQ3R method stands for review. It's what you do after reading.
It's the last thing you do, which is you review
your notes. Remember I mentioned you can write
on sticky pads or even in the book or on a
separate piece of paper. Review the notes that
you wrote while you were reading the text. You can
review the sections or sections that you've read.
You can ask yourself, did I understand the
main idea? Did I understand the key details?
If you're still confused, you can go back and reread the parts that are confusing.
Another thing I would recommend is think about it. Can you explain this information
to someone else? You can even try. If you had to sum up the chapter you just read,
how would you explain it to somebody? These
are great ways to actively read. And remember,
when you are actively reading, you remember way
more. And even though it feels like this is a lot
of work, when it's time for exams or tests, I
promise you will actually have saved yourself
some time. And you'll remember this information
for years and years to come. So, it's actually
a really good idea, if you want to learn something, to use this method. And again,
when I first started university, I did this. I highlighted everything. By the end,
I actually was using this method. And I found
this method has been so helpful that even though
I'm out of university, I use this in everyday
reading. Whenever I have to read something
difficult, this is how I do it. Or if I want to
read something and remember it, this is how I do
it. So, thank you so much for watching today.
Practice makes perfect. So, if you want to
practice what you learned here today, you can
visit our website at www.EngVid.com. And you can
take a quiz to review the concepts in the SQ3R
method. So, you can also check out my YouTube
channel. We have a lot of different information
and a lot of different videos on different
learning strategies, on tips about reading,