Reading I

 

Description

Reading I is a pre-intermediate course designed to equip students with the necessary reading skills through reading and comprehension of a variety of short passages that are descriptive, expository, and dialogic. Comprehension is stimulated through a variety of questions and exercises, especially those generating the ability to guess meaning of words, main ideas in paragraphs and across paragraphs. Text comprehension is followed by a production activity where students discuss relevant issues and express their opinions. The vocabulary exercises that follow text reading tasks are meant to enrich students’ vocabulary in semantic fields provided by the texts.

 

Objectives:

A.     Functional Objectives:

1.       Learners will be able to comprehend the article.

2.      Learners will be able to activate prior knowledge that relates to the topic of the article.

3.      Learners will be able to anticipate the content of the article.

4.      Learners will be able to get the gist in narratives.

5.      Learners will be able to look for specific information in the article.

6.      Students will be able to make comparisons.

 

B.     Performance Objectives:

1.      Students will be able to read the article for detailed information.

2.      Students will read through the headline and sub-headlines and then discuss in small groups what the article could be about.

3.      Students will write the main idea of the article in their own words as possible as they can.

4.      Students will practice top-down strategies (Reading for global understanding, guessing meaning from context, etc.)

5.      Students will orally present their opinions concerning the topic under study.

 

Skills

The Reading comprehension course seeks to foster among students the following skills.

Skimming

Scanning

Intensive reading

Extensive reading

Varying reading speeds

Understanding word meaning by relying on immediate context in the text

Understanding word meaning by relying on overall meaning in the text

Recognizing main ideas

Recognizing supporting details

Recognizing topic sentences

Making inferences