could you give me some advice how to read academic articles in english??

Question

english is my second language and also I have to read sociological and philosophical texts in english for my master thesis. do you have any idea??

Answer 1

http://coe.jmu.edu/learningtoolbox/cornellnotes.html
This is one of the best "systems" I've found for reading texts and academic articles. It also works for taking lecture notes in a class. I've used this and I've taught this, and it works!

Another idea for reading difficult works is called SQ3R:
http://www.studygs.net/texred2.htm

If you learn to practice both of these, you should find it easier to handle the information that academic works give you.

=)

Answer 2

I want to ask one more thing.
when I read a text which includes lots of unknown words, fistly I look their meaning one by one. but this method takes long times.what do you think about my method??
thanks a lot for your advice and help:)

Answer 3

Yes, you should read with a good dictionary on hand -- or open online (http://www.answers.com is a good one), but you should also be able to do a fair amount of "guesstimation" based on the sentence in which the words is used -- that is, the context in which the word is used.