What is Esp

8 Try to use your own words. This will not only help you understand the meaning, but will also assist you in avoiding plagiarism if you use the information in your own writing later.
9 Make sure your notes clearly distinguish between ideas in the text and your own ideas. If you have read critically and added annotations, you will probably want to include these in your notes. However, you need to make a clear distinction between the writer's ideas and your own, especially when you are using the information in your writing.
After note-taking
10 File the notes carefully. You will probably want to be able to access the notes later, so make sure you are able to. If they are hand-written notes, this means filing them in a physical folder or keeping them in a well organised notebook. If they are electronic notes, they should be filed in a logical folder on your computer.


Reading and research skills in an EAP context

This English is very different in context and style from the English we use in day-to-day situations. There are courses available which focus on the skills needed to help understand and use EAP. In this article we focus on reading skills in academic contexts. 

Academic Texts
Reading academic texts can be very challenging, even for native speakers of English. We might read them for research purposes for an assignment, to find an author’s opinion, or to collect data. These texts are often on topics about which we have little previous knowledge and it may be necessary to read several pages of a book or journal to find one piece of information. In your own language you read texts in different ways without realising it, but when given a text to read in English many people think it is necessary to read every word in the text. It isn’t!
Skim Read First
Before spending a long time reading every word of an article and checking the meanings of words, it is worthwhile spending 5-10 minutes skimming the text to get an idea of the general topic or context and to see its usefulness. Skim reading is when we read the text quickly, picking out key words and subtitles, but not reading every word, to get the gist (general idea) of the text. 
Scan the Text
Once you have decided that the text is useful for you, you can then go back and look for more specific information. However, this still does not mean you have to read every word. You can scan the text for information relevant to your research. Scanning is another type of fast reading where you look for specific words or numbers e.g. dates or names. Once you have found the information, you can stop and read that particular paragraph/page in more detail. This method saves a lot of time and frustration of reading irrelevant sections of text.
Unknown Words
There will most likely be words in an academic text of which you won’t know the meaning. Before spending time looking up the words in the dictionary, ask yourself if can you understand the rest of the sentence/paragraph without knowing the meaning. You can actually quite often guess the meaning. When it is necessary to use a dictionary, opt for a printed one, rather than a translation app to find the definition. Dictionaries show definitions in different contexts or commonly associated words, which online translation apps don’t do.