2 credits
Interpretive Reading is the continuation of the previous course. In a more comprehensive and deeper explanation, students are leading to the more complex reading passages in order to develop and deepen students’ understanding of concepts of reading, reading for pleasure, reading comprehension skills, reading faster and thinking skills. This course aims to develop students’ awareness of the reading processes so that they will be able to learn to read in ways that are expected in colleges. Moreover, students are expected to master the lexical and syntactical contents of material to a minimum (at the low-intermediate or intermediate) level. Students are reading not more than about 2,600 vocabulary items in which a sentence does not exceed 18 words in length. Through Interpretive Reading, students are assisted to acquire an accurate understanding of what it means to read in English. Student’s awareness of reading and thinking is further encouraged in order that the students can formulate and articulate their ideas more precisely, and so they also acquire new ways of talking and thinking about a text.
Reading for Pleasure is designed to encourage the students to develop their reading habit regularly for pleasure after they come to understand the importance of reading extensively. Beside getting an access to pick up their own reading material, students are also introduced to the motivating features, a rationale of pleasure reading, successful reading, goal-setting, and record-keeping.
Reading Comprehension skills will also be introduced in this course. In this part, each new comprehension skill is introduced with a rationale and practiced in a series of exercises sequenced from simple to more difficult in order to build up the students’ mastery of the skills. The skills covered include both “top-down” (concept-driven) and “bottom-up” (text-driven) modes of reasoning and comprehending. Specific thinking processes, such as such as scanning, previewing or predicting, vocabulary knowledge for effective reading, topics, topics of paragraphs, main ideas, patterns of organization, skimming, making inference, and summarizing, are presented so the students can get focus on the instruction.
Next, reading faster is one kind of reading improvement programs that is designed to help the students for a better comprehension and time-less reading assimilation. The students will be familiar with the use of cloze passages, reading sprints, reading habit and timed reading.
Lastly, to understand the text effectively, thinking skills activities are aimed to help the students make a transition from translating to thinking in English. Here, correct completion involves understanding English syntactic, semantic, and/or logical connections.
Before the course starts, diagnostic reading test is administered in the beginning of semester in order to know the strengths and weaknesses of the student when they are reading, to know students’ preferences and their previous reading experiences. For the ongoing processes, students will be assigned with individual assignments and peer work. Based on the programme learning outcome, students can show religious, responsible, and academic attitudes and behaviours that can contribute to improving the quality of life in society, nation and state. Students are expected to be able to master English according to the purpose and context of its use. In general outcomes, students are expected to have the skills to make the right decisions, professionally and responsibly based on the results of the analysis of information and data to be able to choose various alternative solutions independently and in groups in solving the learning problems they face in accordance with the context to obtain the best learning outcomes and optimal student development. For specific skills, students are able to use English properly, correctly and fluently according to the context of its use.
At the end of this course, students will be able to:
- develop an awareness and understanding of the reading processes,
- develop an awareness of reading for pleasure,
- apply the reading speed by using cloze passages, reading sprints, reading habit, and timed-reading activity;
- develop the ability to follow logical sequence of ideas in English;