ENGLISH: BASIC– HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Basic is an introductory course to reading research material. Students are introduced for the first time to authentic, unedited articles, chosen mainly from professional journals. The articles average approximately twenty-five paragraphs, although some are shorter and others considerably longer. Emphasis is given both to language skills, such as using the dictionary and understanding sentences, and to reading skills, such as finding the main ideas in an article and following the detailed development of an idea.
ENGLISH: BASIC – SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
This course is an introduction to reading scientific texts. The focus is on reading and comprehending connected passages on scientific or technological topics. The majority of the texts are authentic selections from university-level scientific journal articles about scientific topics. There is equal emphasis on language and reading skills.
ENGLISH: ADVANCED A – HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
This course is an upper-level course, which uses only authentic, unedited articles chosen from professional journals. Although the length of the articles varies, they average approximately thirty to thirty-five paragraphs. In addition to reviewing language skills, which focus on wards and sentences, this course explores in depth reading strategies for understanding an article as a whole.
ENGLISH: ADVANCED A – SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
The purpose of this course is to prepare students to read and comprehend academic texts and articles that are related to their field of study. The majority of texts at this level are authentic textbook and professional journal articles. Students learn to apply reading strategies such as previewing, predicting, skimming and scanning to a variety of text types. Summarizing skills are introduced. Students are encouraged to expand their scientific, para-scientific and non-technical vocabulary.
ENGLISH: ADVANCED B – HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
This exit level course carries two units of credit. The course uses only authentic, unedited articles chosen from professional journals. Although the length of the articles varies, they average over thirty-five paragraphs. In addition, the articles are characterized by the complexity of their language, sentence structure, and organization. The course provides students with skills and strategies for dealing with these difficulties.
ENGLISH: ADVANCED B – SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
This exit level course carries two units of credit. It focuses on the reading and understanding of academic texts and articles that are useful to the students’ academic studies and/or relevant to scientists and engineers in general. The emphasis is on determining the organization of the text and understanding the relationships of the ideas within it. Students learn to summarize information either graphically or verbally and to synthesize information extracted from several sources. The level of the texts is typical of articles found in Scientific American.
