The present course is a series of reading comprehension units spanning intermediate and upper intermediate levels (European Levels B1 - B2 - C1). It is designed to complement the New English Grammar Course - Intermediate & Advanced Levels. It consists of two series of five reading comprehension units, the first at intermediate level and the second at upper intermediate level. The aim is to provide a significant input of reading practice for students who, with the knowledge of the language that they have acquired in the school system and/or through independent study, are still some way from attaining a real reading autonomy especially as regards more formal texts. Very often university students with several years of English language study in the school system are found to have poor reading competence: texts that are written in formal style (including course manuals) are often poorly understood, and frequently the reading task is aborted after only a few pages. The conclusion that the student draws from this experience is often that reading anything but the simplest texts in a foreign language is to be avoided. In most such cases, the reason for failure is that the student in question has simply had no substantial exposure to English language texts, his or her experience having been limited to a small number of short ‘anthology’ texts (usually of a literary character). In many cases, this may mean a total lifetime experience of reading in English that has not gone beyond twenty or thirty pages. The present course aims to remedy this by providing a substantial quantity of accessible reading material, in the form of text extracts of gradually increasing length and stylistic complexity. For each extract, some sort of contextualising information is provided, and this is used to set some specific comprehension tasks (which are sometimes revised as the reader advances through the text). In general the comprehension tasks are designed to lead the reader to formulate hypotheses about what the text will say; the actual reading should then be a process of verifying the hypotheses against the text. In the present course, each unit consists of a number of thematically linked text extracts (taken from print and online sources); the prevailing text types are expositive and argumentative, and the stylistic levels range from informal (web blogs, comments left by readers on newspaper websites) to formal (leading articles from newspapers, articles from prestigious magazines and book reviews). The subjects have been chosen for their interest value and accessibility.
Reading Texts: Intermediate & Advanced Levels
TAYLOR, PETER GRENVILLE
2009
Abstract
The present course is a series of reading comprehension units spanning intermediate and upper intermediate levels (European Levels B1 - B2 - C1). It is designed to complement the New English Grammar Course - Intermediate & Advanced Levels. It consists of two series of five reading comprehension units, the first at intermediate level and the second at upper intermediate level. The aim is to provide a significant input of reading practice for students who, with the knowledge of the language that they have acquired in the school system and/or through independent study, are still some way from attaining a real reading autonomy especially as regards more formal texts. Very often university students with several years of English language study in the school system are found to have poor reading competence: texts that are written in formal style (including course manuals) are often poorly understood, and frequently the reading task is aborted after only a few pages. The conclusion that the student draws from this experience is often that reading anything but the simplest texts in a foreign language is to be avoided. In most such cases, the reason for failure is that the student in question has simply had no substantial exposure to English language texts, his or her experience having been limited to a small number of short ‘anthology’ texts (usually of a literary character). In many cases, this may mean a total lifetime experience of reading in English that has not gone beyond twenty or thirty pages. The present course aims to remedy this by providing a substantial quantity of accessible reading material, in the form of text extracts of gradually increasing length and stylistic complexity. For each extract, some sort of contextualising information is provided, and this is used to set some specific comprehension tasks (which are sometimes revised as the reader advances through the text). In general the comprehension tasks are designed to lead the reader to formulate hypotheses about what the text will say; the actual reading should then be a process of verifying the hypotheses against the text. In the present course, each unit consists of a number of thematically linked text extracts (taken from print and online sources); the prevailing text types are expositive and argumentative, and the stylistic levels range from informal (web blogs, comments left by readers on newspaper websites) to formal (leading articles from newspapers, articles from prestigious magazines and book reviews). The subjects have been chosen for their interest value and accessibility.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
