This course is designed to provide students with opportunities to apply their mastery of a wide variety of critical reading strategies, including speed reading, marking and charting the text, note taking, finding underlying assumption (both stated and unstated), identifying argument and author’ position, justifying argument, summarizing and writing response of written academic texts at upper intermediate level using CER (claim, evidence and reasoning). It also gives the students chances to practice using targets vocabulary from the Academic Word List (AWL) level 5-8. The topics in this course include literacy, sociology, pedagogy, and many more. Along the course, students are involved in various activities designed to help them practice and improve their critical reading skills, including: responding to upper-intermediate academic texts by having individual presentation, group and class discussion, and composing summaries of written academic texts. All teaching-learning activities are conducted through lecturing, discussion, and question-answer.

Course Overview

1. Understand basic concepts of the critical reading;
2. Develop critical reading skills in responding to semi-scientific and scientific texts read and apply it to college courses and real- life situations;
3. Improve comprehension in reading semi-scientific and scientific texts using writing-to-learn strategies, such as outlining, paraphrasing, mapping, summarizing, and making annotated bibliography.