Course Description
This course is for students who wish to upgrade their reading for personal, educational and/or employment purposes. This course is designed for students who read short, non-academic materials in English without feeling a need for translation, but read slowly and uncritically. This course emphasizes specific reading skills such as predicting, scanning, skimming, surveying, guessing meaning from context, and notetaking.
Course Content
Reading Skills
- To follow the ideas and information in readings
- Follow written instructions
- Use pre-reading techniques to prepare for a reading task
- In expository texts, recognize purpose and/or issue, overall key idea, main ideas, and key details
- Follow organization of a text and paragraphs within a text
- Scan for specific information
- In opinion texts, identify author’s opinions, reasons, and supporting details
- Make inferences
- Describe plot, major and minor characters, and setting in a short story or simplified novel
- To determine meanings of unfamiliar words in course materials
- Use an English-English dictionary
- Use prefixes to determine meanings and suffixes to identify grammatical uses
- Use several types of context clues, such as parts of speech, related words, and other sentence clues
- To find materials in the library
- Use both digital and print resources
- To use study skills
- Take notes, outline text, make margin annotations
- Interpret visuals in text material
- Prepare for tests (T/F, completion, matching, multiple choice, and short answer)
- Learn content from text/class materials
Accuracy
- To self-monitor for accuracy
- Use editing symbols
- Apply knowledge of parts of speech, sentence elements, specified sentence types, and mechanics
- To identify and work on as need arises
- All accuracy items from the 100 level
- Tenses, modals, time markers (including prepositions)
- Simple, compound, and complex sentences (with adverb clauses).
- Pronoun and verb tense shifts
- Frequently-used count and non-count nouns, number, simple rules for articles/determiners
Classroom Skills
- To take responsibility for the following:
- attendance and punctuality
- class work and assignments
- participation and teamwork
- To follow instructions, communicates with peers and instructors, and ask for clarification
- To show an awareness of cultural differences and general features of own culture and the world
Learning Activities
Whole and small group instruction will be combined with individual assistance and student-directed learning. Students will receive assistance with reading difficulties that arise from lack of familiarity with the structure, lexicon and cultural content of the reading passages. Students will participate in the setting of goals by identifying their communicative and language development needs, and in the selection of learning activities. Students will discuss personal rights and social responsibilities as they affect their intended fields of study, occupations, and personal life
Means of Assessment
- Complete assigned skill-development tasks to a specified level of accuracy
- Read instructor and self-selected materials, both factual and issue-oriented, and write informal reports
- Complete quizzes, both skill based and content based
- Complete at least one self-assessment of learning strategies, progress, strengths, weaknesses, and classroom skills to be discussed with the instructor
- Use common software to communicate and to complete simple information management tasks, ie. to word process assignments, send e-mails, or sign into MyDouglas
A mastery model of on-going evaluation will be used. A student will reach mastery when s/he has demonstrated through satisfactory completion of exercises, assignments and other assessments that the course objectives have been achieved.
Where formal tests of specific skills are used, mastery will be defined as a score of 70% or more.
Progress will be monitored on a regular basis by the instructor in consultation with each student.
Learning Outcomes
Overall Objectives
Extend fluency and confidence in reading for a range of personal and academic and employment purposes
Specific Objectives
- Read and understand stories and short, authentic reading materials on relevant and practical topics to obtain and record information, learn about ideas and issues, and expand vocabulary
- Use strategies to learn academic material
- Listen and speak to prepare for, support, and extend reading skills
- Write with a specified level of accuracy to extend reading skills
- Participate effectively in a college classroom
- Assess progress
- Develop awareness of differences within personal, social and cultural activities
Textbook Materials
Students may be required to purchase a textbook to be determined by the instructor.