What’s a Secondary Source Anyway? Helping Students Navigate and Effectively Integrate Scholarly Materials 

By Anahit Manoukian, Spanish and Portuguese

Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025

One of the most challenging aspects of teaching a second-semester reading and composition course is introducing students to secondary sources. When I designed my “Letters from the Hispanic World” course, I intentionally focused on primary texts to provide students with a diverse selection of cultural materials that exemplified the epistolary genre. By the time students submitted the revised drafts of their first essays, they typically felt comfortable with analyzing primary texts, having honed their skills through multiple revisions. However, the second essay introduced a new challenge: they were required to incorporate at least two secondary sources into their analysis of the primary text. Although I had guided students in conducting library searches and locating secondary sources, many struggled to integrate them effectively, often inserting quotes awkwardly at the end of their essays, completely disconnected from their main arguments. As I reviewed these drafts, it became clear that many students didn’t fully understand how to assess and synthesize secondary sources. It was time to backtrack. 

As part of our Writing Workshop Wednesday, I led a focused session on deciphering and evaluating academic sources, focusing on how to distinguish between primary and secondary materials and how to assess the relevance of secondary sources. I provided students with examples of peer-reviewed academic articles, as well as books and book chapters covering literary criticism and critical theory. Since the week’s primary text was Josefa Amar y Borbón’s Discourse in Defense of the Talents of Women, students were asked to engage with secondary sources on the Spanish Enlightenment and eighteenth-century women writers in Spain. Through these examples, I demonstrated that secondary materials not only come in various formats but also serve distinct purposes, such as providing context, literary analysis, or theoretical frameworks. To reinforce this, I shared an example of a secondary source and together we read the first few paragraphs, commenting on the type of information each section provided: context, analysis, interpretation. Then, students worked in small groups to continue reading the secondary source. As I walked around the room, I observed how they thoughtfully color-coded the text and discussed the purpose and content of each section. When we reconvened, students successfully synthesized the author’s main arguments and identified how the source could be used to contextualize and deepen our understanding of key themes, such as gender roles and societal expectations during the Spanish Enlightenment. Together, we drafted sample sentences to integrate the source into our analysis of the primary text, focusing on the strategic use of verbs of attribution. At the end of the exercise, several students eagerly shared how the activity helped them recognize areas for improvement in their use of secondary sources and made them feel better prepared to revise and strengthen their analysis. 

I was able to assess the effectiveness of this exercise in two key ways. First, during our class discussion, I observed that students were not only able to distinguish between primary and secondary sources but also demonstrated greater confidence in engaging with secondary materials. They successfully synthesized the author’s main arguments and even offered alternative interpretations, reflecting a deeper level of critical engagement and contributing to a livelier class discussion. Additionally, I noticed the impact of these skills in the revised versions of their essays. Instead of awkwardly inserted quotes, students more naturally integrated the secondary sources into their analysis, creating a dialogue between their interpretation of the primary text and the scholarly perspectives they engaged. Through a clear explanation of secondary sources and their diverse purposes, students gained the tools to engage with these materials more effectively and analytically, becoming more confident researchers.