Basic Skills for Reading and Writing 2020

The aim of the course is to train elementary level students in the use of basic literacy strategies so they can transfer them to the context of their university courses and perform as more competent readers and writers in English, when asked to deal with articles, manuals and/or other technical texts and to produce summary/abstract paragraphs in English.

Upon completion of all course Units, at an elementary/beginner level, you are expected to be able to…
– Put into practice the reading strategies introduced during the course, namely: previewing, predicting, skimming and scanning, to read elementary/beginner level texts.
– Analyze vocabulary in context to infer meaning and/or use online/paper dictionaries to work out unknown words found in elementary/beginner level texts.
– Classify different words into the correct part of speech, according to their function in the sentence.
– Identify the parts of a simple sentence, i.e. Subject & Predicate, differentiating between sentences and sentence-fragments.
– Write correct simple sentences about topics which are familiar to the student.
– Recognize the constituting elements of a good paragraph: topic sentence, supporting sentences and concluding sentence, both when reading and producing an elementary/beginner level text.
– Recognize the organization patterns of three different text types: narrative descriptions, sequencing and opinion paragraphs.
– Identify purpose, audience, main ideas, arguments/supporting details (distinguishing between facts and opinions) when reading elementary/beginner level texts.
– Engage in the writing process to plan and produce effective and coherent paragraphs of the types described in g) (including a topic sentence, supporting sentences and a concluding sentence) about topics which are familiar to the student.