ENG 102: Reading and Composition

Course rationale

This course aims to equip students with the reading skills they need for comprehension of written English of all kinds, and to teach study skills to help students cope with language/linguistic demands in an academic context, as lectures, discussions, assignments, and presentations. This course also aims at raising students’ understanding of the relation between the lexical items and structural forms as well as expanding their vocabulary knowledge by focusing on word formation including suffixes and prefixes. Students also learn idioms and collocations, slang, proverbs, and phrasal verbs to help them better explore, review, play with and enhance their skills, in spoken and written expressions.

Course content

This course introduces integrated skills with a major emphasis on reading processes– skimming for extracting main ideas, scanning for information, reading to make inferences, reading and comprehension of short articles and essays, reading to summarize and evaluate articles, text, and books, reading and responding to different genres of writing and reading for class presentation. Students will also practice and develop a variety of writing skills to produce effective paragraphs and essays. The course is divided into three areas: readings, basic principles of writing, and editing for grammatical errors (parallelism, dangling and misplaced modifiers, etc.). Students will work through these three areas concurrently following the weekly schedule provided.

Course objectives

This course aims to help students improve their reading skills by studying basic comprehension skills, including the main idea, major and minor details, and patterns of the organization using speed reading strategies, discussions, reflections, and written responses. Students are exposed to a wide range of authentic reading materials including reviews, and articles from journals, newspapers, magazines, and academic texts in order to develop skills to do effective skimming and scanning, use contextual clues to guess the meanings of words, comprehend contrasting viewpoints, predict and identify main ideas, and decode inter-sentential clues. By the end of the semester, students will develop the ability to summarize, paraphrase, and cite reading material in accordance with APA/MLA guidelines and produce effective expository and analytical academic papers.

References

  1. Richmond, K. (2009) Inside Reading: The Academic Word List in Context (4th Edition), Oxford University Press.
  2.  Langan, J. (2011) English Skills with Readings (8th Edition). McGraw-Hill