Reading/Video Guides

Reading and watching videos can often result in a passive learning experience. To engage students more actively, provide a guide that directs students to the most important aspects of the content while they are reading or watching. This has an added benefit of helping students to take better notes.

At times, these guides may be knowledge based. However, you should try to create questions which allow practical application of student learning. They may be graded or ungraded, required or optional.

Reading and video guides help to take the more passive activity of reading a chapter, article, or website or watching a video, and more actively engage the student. These sort of guides also help students to focus on what’s most important in the materials, something that many students struggle with when first starting out in college. Guided questioning strategies work better than simple note-taking at improving student learning, as many novice learners are not yet skilled at determining what is and isn’t important.

Generic Reading Guide Questions:

  1. Summarize the main points of the reading.
    1. Main point
    2. Sub-points
    3. Support for points
  2. Are there any points in the reading that are assumed or implied, but not explicitly stated?
  3. What kinds of connections can you make with what you’ve read and your own experiences?
  4. What kinds of connections can you make with this reading and other readings you’ve completed for the course? Try drawing out the connections in a concept map.
  5. What questions do you have about the reading?

Additional Resources:

  • Improving College Reading Skills (Affordable Colleges Online). Provides tips for students to help improve college reading.
  • Concept Mapping (BYU Center for Teaching and Learning). Explains how to use concept mapping to increase student understanding of concepts.

Specific Reading Guide Example:

Example provided by Dr. Chris Mellinger, Assistant Professor of Spanish Interpreting and Translation Studies at UNC Charlotte

Reading Guide for Roman Jakobson

By the end of reading “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (in the Venuti reader, pp. 126 – 131, you should be able to answer the following questions. For questions 1 and 2, you might need to search a bit on the internet about the author.

  1. Who is Roman Jakobson? What was his position in society, and what is he most widely known for?
  2. What languages did Jakobson work with?
  3. When did Jakobson write “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (year is OK)? Where does that put this work in relation to others in the field?
  4. Jakobson describes three kinds of translation. What are they, and how are they defined?
    1. ______
    2. ______
    3. ______
  5. Jakobson describes how translation “from one language into another substitutes messages in one language not for separate code-units but for entire messages” (127). What does this say about his view of language?
  6. Jakobson describes an example about cheese in different languages. Do you agree or disagree with this example? Does it work based on the languages you work with?
  7. Jakobson argues that “all cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language” (128). What does this mean for the task of the translator? How might Jakobson respond to people who suggest some terms or expressions are ‘untranslatable’?
  8. What does Jakobson say about what languages convey?
  9. Toward the end of the article, Jakobson talks about the translation of poetry. How does this fit with his overarching argument?
  10. If you had to summarize Jakobson’s argument in a single sentence, what would it be?

Other Relevant Information

  • Who/what has inspired Jakobson to write these texts?
  • Who Jakobson Jerome inspire/influence in later works?
  • Interesting point

Video Guide Examples:

Answer the following questions as you watch the video, making sure to write out or type your answers. Feel free to pause the video to have more time to answer the questions.

  1. Sample question 1
  2. Sample question 2

After watching the video, answer these questions:

  1. Summarize the main points and arguments made in video in one or two sentences.
  2. What kinds of connections can you make with what you’ve watched and your own experiences?
  3. What kinds of connections can you make with this information and other information you’ve learned in this course? Try drawing out the connections in a concept map.
  4. What questions do you have about the video?

Additional Resources

  • Effective Educational Videos (Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University). Provides an overview of how to create effective educational videos.
  • TEDEd’s library of videos (TEDEd) Contains examples of videos that have been created with guiding questions (in the Think tab of each video).