School of Languages and Area Studies (SLAS)

English for Academic Purposes Courses

Reading Academic Texts and Discussing the Literature

slas - jig reading

This course is designed to improve your academic reading skills by looking at a variety of textual sources suitable for the university context. Lessons are structured to improve:

  • your awareness of reading for specific information
  • reading for gist and understanding meaning through context
  • your ability to identify author stance, recognising bias
  • your ability to differentiate fact from opinion.

Having a strong foundation in reading is essential to doing research successfully at university and this course provides a strong basis of the fundamental skills necessary for success.

Course description audio recording:

video placeholder

Course Outline:

Week
Course Content
Assessment tasks
1
 Introduction, Different ways of reading (skimming, scanning, close reading)  
2
 Lexical cohesion, Close reading, series of short texts  
3
 Different styles of argument, fact versus opinion, author stance.  
4
 Students identify features of texts Formative Assessment
Texts. Students identify features of texts and present findings to class
5
 Summary skills. Genre-switching and guided summary tasks  
6
 Students bring in their own texts for an information exchange and practice writing task – writing a summary of another student’s text  
7
 In-class formative assessment Formative assessment. 150-word summary of an academic text chosen by the teacher
8
 Individual and group tutorials & return of assessments  
9
 Developing  your Harvard referencing  (bibliography + in-text referencing)  
10
 In library, practising referencing with books, articles, etc, from their own subject discipline  
11
 Academic reporting verbs: studying the syntax using a corpus (SketchEngine).  
12
 Proof reading. Working on final assessment (literature review based on a number of contrasting quotations) on a particular topic, chosen by the tutor. Submission of final literature review (1500 words) (see unit handbook for details)