“Asking is faster than skimming”: AI-powered tools and what they mean for academic reading
By Dr Svetlana Chigaeva-Heddad
Assistant Professor / English Team Leader
Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong
The main aim of this session is to engage participants in discussing the impact of genAI tools on our understanding of academic literacy and the ways we have been training students to become literate in the discourses of their chosen academic disciplines. The presentation will start by situating the conversation within the latest research on academic reading, a significant yet rather invisible and under-investigated activity that our students are expected to engage in on a regular basis. The review will cover several key conceptualisations of academic reading, ranging from reading as the mental processes needed to decode and comprehend texts to reading as a socio-political activity. The second part of the presentation will focus on the recent academic reading and research support workshops organised for undergraduate students by a self-access learning centre at a private tertiary institution in Hong Kong. The workshops introduced students to a number of AI-powered academic search assistants such as SciSpace and Consensus and AI-powered reading assistants such as Humata and Unriddle. The affordances and constraints of these tools will be then analysed with respect to the key areas highlighted in the literature review.
The session is expected to be of value to academic literacy curriculum and programme developers, managers, as well as teachers across disciplines interested in integrating AI-powered reading and research tools into their lessons.
Biography
Dr Svetlana Chigaeva-Heddad is an Assistant Professor and English Team Leader at the Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong, where she oversees the implementation of the English language curriculum and supports her team’s professional development. Her research interests include AI-mediated academic reading, gen AI literacy development, language curriculum design, and language teacher agency.
