The instructor will facilitate, observe and evaluate students’ development of reading ability. Whole and small group instruction will be combined with individual assistance and student-directed learning. Students will receive assistance with reading difficulties that rise from lack of familiarity with the structure, lexicon and cultural content of the reading passages.
This course emphasizes reading for main ideas and using new vocabulary strategies. There are extensive reading assignments to generate ideas for short compositions written in the corequisite course EASL 0174.
- EASL materials such as simplified versions of famous books, structured readers
- Westcoast Reader
- heavily illustrated magazines such as National Geographic and Life
- newspaper headlines, picture-captions and short items (possibly adapted for easier comprehension)
- pleasure readings, such as pieces brought in by the students themselves; short fiction in EASL
- various English-only dictionaries.
Within relevant educational, employment and social contexts, students who master this course will be able to:
- read continuously materials in course content, and other student-selected materials without recourse to translation or to the dictionary, and develop the ability to skip unfamiliar words and expressions not necessary for the comprehension of overall reading of the text.
- read continuously materials in course content and other student selected readings without recourse to translation or to the dictionary, and develop skills in guessing from context the approximate meaning of unfamiliar words and expressions necessary for comprehension of overall reading of the text.
- improve reading rate, without dropping comprehension rate below 80%, on timed readings.
- locate main ideas in short readings.
- locate main ideas in individual paragraphs within short readings.
- re-tell, in their own words, a story they have read.
- use an English-English dictionary, without a bilingual dictionary, to rapidly locate a target word.
- select, from several definitions, the one most appropriate to the context in which the word was encountered.
This course is a college preparatory course and students will be marked on a MASTERY basis. Mastery will be granted to students who achieve over 70% on a series of in-class and out-of-class assessments.
Textbooks and Materials to be Purchased by Students
Student may be required to purchase a textbook to be determined by the instructor.
EASL 0264 or 0265