Exercise

A good way of developing skimming skills is by putting texts together again. The paragraphs below are part of an article. They are not in the correct order. Would you please put them into the correct order?

Title: Adjusting to Higher Education

I. The difficulties facing adult learners can, for convenience, be categorized into three kinds: social, psychological and physiological. But for others such problems do not seem to arise.

II. Discussion with students in various university departments suggests that a quite common complaint is that they do not know what their teachers expect of them. Failure to specify and to communicate aims and objectives may also have long-term consequences. Initial practice can be offered in reading, taking notes from lectures or books and, perhaps, in writing brief reports or paragraphs. Skill in skimming articles to select important or relevant points, and use of the index to look up a topic in a number of books, may also need practice. Science students, in particular, tend to grow accustomed to careful, sequential reading through a text and may need reminding that there are other ways of reading and using books. Students' skills in writing often differ widely on entry. Problems most frequently arise with those who seem hardly literate initially.

III. New students may refer to feelings of bewilderment because of the differences in size between school and a large university. The sheer variety of possible activities can be confusing students who have chosen to cater for themselves may, at first, have difficulty in finding time for shopping and housekeeping. To these domestic problems may be added financial difficulties when grants fail to arrive, often in the case of foreign students who have no family at hand to assist them.

IV. The problems of adjusting to life at university or a college of higher education can be more acute for mature students, but it does not follow that this will necessarily be the case. Nonetheless, speaking in broad terms it is possible to discern some similarities within groups of mature students that suggest implications for teaching and learning in higher education. It appears, for example, from various studies, that there are three main reasons why adults take up full-time study: (1) to make a change in their career; (2) to obtain a job qualification, for such reasons as job promotion; (3) to seek personal and intellectual development.