Reading for 'academic' purposes

Abstract There are four skills that students are supposed to gain while learning a language. Reading is one of these major skills and it is an important component in language learning. At the same time, it is closely related to the other language skills since the development of reading skill progresses simultaneously with the development of writing, listening and speaking.For instance, when someone learns how to write in target language, it means that he has already learned how to read in the language. As it is understood from this example, reading is a complementary element in learning a language.Therefore, classroom methodology in reading lessons plays an important role in the development of students’ reading skills.It shapes the students’ point of view to reading skill. Based on that, this paper aims to explain extensive reading that encourages students to read more and often by providing them to experience a wide variety of text types and in extensive reading, students do self-selected reading with only minimal accountability, writing brief summaries or comments on what they have read.( Krashen &Mason,1997,p.91-102)Associated with this , the study also focuses on the effects of extensive reading on the development of reading skill depending on the attitude of students towards reading.

Dear L6 Student, As you learned in Week 1, an important writing task in this course is the Referenced Essay. In this writing assignment, you will be asked to state your opinion or position on a topic and to support your position with logical arguments and evidence. In our Referenced Essay, the general theme will be education. In Week 6, you will find out more information about the specific education topics that you can respond to in your essay.

2010

2020

This teaching material is given to the students of the third semester at Uin Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang whose major are non-English. the handout was presented and practiced in English language class or bahasa Inggris 2 class. the topic was about understanding, identifying, and comprehending the topic, main idea, subject and supporting details of reading comprehension. The competence taught in this class was of course reading comprehension (choosing the best topic) related to genre-based text

Assessment -the act of gathering information on a daily basis in order to understand individual student's learning needs.

2012

Welcome to issue 48 of Research Notes, our quarterly publication reporting on matters relating to research, test development and validation within University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations. This issue presents research undertaken within the 2011 English Australia/Cambridge ESOL Action Research in ELICOS Programme, which supports teachers working in the English language intensive courses for overseas students (ELICOS) sector in Australia. In the first article Katherine Brandon provides the background to the 2011 Action Research (AR) Programme which sought projects to explore knowledge, skills, attitudes or practices in teaching English for specific or general purposes; monitoring student progress; and student motivation. This is followed by a summary of a recent study into the impact of the Programme for the ELICOS sector by Anne Burns who focuses on the impact on participating teachers, their institutions and more widely. Next, six funded projects are presented by the teacher-researchers who participated in the 2011 Programme within five different institutions and several regions within Australia. The first pair of articles explore specific skills in the classroom. Sara Kablaoui and Amal Khabbaz explore the development of reading skills of Arabic English as a Second Language (ESL) learners through four specific reading strategies which helped to improve the participants' reading skills. Next, John Gardiner reports on his study in which he investigated the grammar teaching beliefs of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) learners in order to improve classroom instruction and student motivation. The second pair of articles focus on aspects of learner autonomy and include the winner of the 2011 Action Research in ELICOS Award, Brendan Brown. Brendan explores ways of improving the pronunciation of higher level students, based on the students' identification of key aspects of their own pronunciation and independent practice. Adi Rotem's project sought to enable greater learner autonomy amongst EAP students, using teaching and learning strategies to observe and document learner progress along an existing independent learning continuum with students encouraged to form learner-directed study groups outside of class. The final two articles explore assessment. Brigette Fyfe and Christine Vella report on their study into using assessment rubrics as a teaching tool in order to improve students' academic writing skills through an increase in understanding of academic conventions and building upon intrinsic features of academic texts. Finally, Megan Baker describes how she created a blog for a mixed-level class of students in order to see whether this increased their fluency and creativity in writing and whether this could be used for self-assessment. The third round of research funded by this programme is underway and we look forward to reporting on these studies in a future issue. We finish this issue with a picture of the presentation of the 2011 Action Research in ELICOS Award. Contents edi torial notes 1 The english australia/Cambridge esOL action Research in eLiCOs Programme: Background and rationale: Kather ine Brandon 2 Teacher research in a national programme: impact and implications: Anne Burns 3 Developing reading skills of learners from arabic-speaking backgrounds: 7