Our University’s Academic Reading suite of courses is aimed at graduate students at the Schools of Humanities and Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities. The programme offers courses in six European languages and up to three levels. All students are research active, and these courses enable them to access secondary literature. The scholarly field, length, style and age of texts is wide. They range from poetry and theatre to music, archaeology, law, philosophy, classics, history or geography and anthropology and they date from late medieval / early renaissance to contemporary. All students are graduate researchers, and the cohort does not have a unified reading list or common focus. Due to the wide and unpredictable range of topics, the lecturer, while being the language specialist, is rarely the topic or even field specialist. This requires the students and the lecturer to approach the reading with a keen critical eye and pull their strengths together to unlock the meaning(s) of the text. This is not a translation course as we do not aim at producing an English equivalent but rather to critically read and comment any aspect of the text that is relevant to the given academic project. Courses are designed, therefore, to teach the very reading skill rather than a set of authors or texts. The teaching approach and methodology reflect these realities. With the support of large language models (ChatGPT, Grok, BERT etc.) we can now access such texts in a less time-consuming fashion. However, the quality of this translation must be questioned and the content approached critically. This is especially true for niche, older and/or handwritten texts. In this presentation I will argue for a pedagogical shift from in-depth to comparison reading strategies and discuss the methodological implications of such an approach.

Keywords: Academic reading, world languages, methodology, AI.