How to prepare to and review 阅读课 (reading course)?

[xuefang]

I would like to hear your ideas and advice for how to prepare to my reading course lessons and how to review after class. I'm studying a Chinese language BA at Sun Yat-Sen University, but I'm sure most of other universities also have this 阅读 course.

At our course we use a book called Intermediate Chinese Reading Course 汉语阅读教程中级2 (You can see the book here). Our aim during the course seem to be to learn how to read faster. And not only faster, but to also understand the main points in the text.

First we learned about 主次 and 主句 and how they can help us to find the most important points in a text faster. Right now we are studying 标志词 and how they can also help us to determine what is said in a text, what is important and how those words help us to read faster. So this course also includes grammar and expecially grammar terms (which are not my strong points).

The problem is that I don't know how to prepare for this class. We can't use a dictionary because the point is to learn to read difficult text without dictionary (prep us for HSK for example). I can't read the text before class, because then the exercises during class wouldn't be as effective. Those excercises have to be finished in class in a certain amount of time (usually few minutes).

Then after class, how should I review? The book is full of short texts that we go over during the class, should I read those again? Should I learn the vocabulary? (Well, that would be a lot of work!) Or should I do the exercises that we didn't have time to do during class?

At this point the only thing I've done is to check those grammar terms and 标志词 with dictionary so I know what they really mean in English.

During the course we also need to read a Chinese book and that's going well.

My questions are: Do you prepare for your 阅读 class and if you do, how? Do you review what you have learned during the class and how you review? Do you do something else at home that helps you with the 阅读 course?

[imron]

You might find some of these posts interesting:

Reading

Vocab Aquisition

Improving your reading speed

Personally I would make sure that after class you are looking up as many of the words from the articles as is comfortable to handle in a day (maybe leaving some for the next day or the day after if necessary just to provide some spacing), and then also going back over the articles after class to improve reading speed on articles you are familiar with. If you have the time, I would also start looking for other native content to practice with. Reading through it first and underlining (but not looking up) new words or unfamiliar sentence patterns. Then going back and looking up the words (again only at a pace you can comfortably handle). Increased vocab and reading speed will then start to have a positive flow-on effect when reading in class.

[Guest realmayo]

I sat through those kind of classes for a semester, same book I think: I felt the best approach was not to prepare but treat them as an exercise in reading quickly against the clock, trying to pick out the main points -- basically, a skill that is heavily tested in exams, but also has a certain value in real life too. No harm in going back to review the pieces after class and so on, as Imron suggests, but bear in mind that many of these texts will be selected to test some "this is how to do 阅读 teaching point" so some will be crammed full of lists, or contain lots of different tree-species, and so on, and if you're looking for more normal or authentic texts to read and reread, you might be better off looking elsewhere.