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Print Price: $76.95

Format:
Paperback
300 pp.
42 full-colour photos and 36 figures, 8" x 10"

ISBN-13:
9780199009541

Publication date:
December 2014

Imprint: OUP Canada

Perspectives

Academic Reading Skills and Practice

Marina Rozenberg

Inspiring students to take a critical and multifaceted approach to reading, Perspectives combines skills instruction and authentic academic content to prepare learners for the demands of post-secondary education.

In Part I of the text, a careful and thorough handling of reading skills and strategies-such as annotating text, managing difficult vocabulary, assessing inferences, distinguishing between facts and opinions, and evaluating techniques of persuasion-establishes a foundation from which students can analyze and synthesize information. Explicit instruction is combined with activities, in the form of sentences, paragraphs, and short passages, giving students the opportunity to practise the skills and strategies immediately.

Part II comprises eight stand-alone reading units, each with three readings selections from a different disciplinary perspective. These readings expose students to more than twenty academic disciplines, including sociology, environmental studies, mechanical engineering, business, and biology, within themed units that range from "Maintaining Law and Order" to "Living with Nature" to "Culture." Each reading is followed by a variety of questions and activities to test students' comprehension and fundamental reading skills. The reading units end with an opportunity for reflection and synthesis, where students exercise more cognitively demanding reading skills, thinking critically about information related to all three readings in that unit.

A thought-provoking, practical, and versatile resource, Perspectives affords students the tools required to take on their academic reading with confidence.

Readership : Perspectives: Academic Reading Skills and Practice is a core reading text for advanced EAP students preparing for English post-secondary studies. It is also appropriate for first-year communications courses for native or non-native English speakers.

Part I: Academic Reading Skills and Strategies
Unit 1: Smart Reading Strategies
Reading with Purpose
Interacting with the Text
Summarizing to Learn and Remember
Monitoring Your Readiness to Start the Assignment
Expanding Your Vocabulary
Unit 2: Smart Vocabulary Strategies
Identifying Terms and Their Definitions
Analyzing Word Parts
Guessing Meaning in Context
Ignoring Less-Important Unfamiliar Words
Integrating the Strategies
Unit 3: Main Ideas and Supporting Details
Distinguishing between Main Idea and Supporting Details
Identifying an Implied Main Idea
Distinguishing between Major and Minor Supporting Details
Identifying Organizational Patterns
Studying Graphical Information
Integrating the Skills
Unit 4: Inferences, Facts, and Opinions
Assessing Valid and Invalid Inferences
Distinguishing between Facts and Opinions
Learning about Informed Opinions
Identifying Biased Opinions
Integrating the Skills
Unit 5: Assessing an Argument
Identifying the Purpose of a Text
Identifying the Audience
Identifying Techniques of Persuasion
Assessing an Argument's Support and Logic
Part II: Cross-Disciplinary Readings
Unit 6: Maintaining Law and Order
Punishment in Elizabethan England (History)
Designing Safer Cities (Urban Planning)
House Arrest, Electronic Monitoring, and Global Positioning Systems (Criminology)
Unit 7: Race and Racism
Race (Anthropology)
The DNA Olympics - Jamaicans Win Sprinting "Genetic Lottery" - and Why We Should All Care (Sport Sciences)
The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide (Economics)
Unit 8: Living with Nature
Implications of Climate Change; Melting Ice and Rising Sea Levels (Environmental Studies)
Why Japan Took the Nuclear Risk (Resource Management)
Staying Power (Electrical Engineering)
Unit 9: Transportation
Traffic Jam (Urban Studies)
Ridesharing in North America (Transportation and Sustainability Studies)
How Electric Cars Got Stuck in First Gear (Business)
Unit 10: Ethnocentrism
Prejudice (Psychology)
The Self-Reference Criterion: A Major Obstacle (Marketing)
Terror and Ethnocentrism: Foundations of American Support for the War on Terrorism (Political Science)
Unit 11: Cancer
Cancer Cells: Growing out of Control (Biology)
Infernal Mechanism (Mechanical Engineering)
What Happens When You Live? (Health Studies)
Unit 12: Gender Equality
Women in International Marketing (Marketing)
The Global Glass Ceiling: Why Empowering Women is Good for Business (Foreign Policy)
Born to Serve: The State of Old Women and Widows in India (Sociology)
Unit 13: Culture
Culture and the Self (Psychology)
Uncovering the Role of Culture in Learning, Development, and Education (Education)
Managing Conflict (Communication Studies)

Teacher's Resource: Perspectives Companion Site

Marina Rozenberg is an instructor for Fraser International College's EAP program, affiliated with Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, BC. At FIC, she enjoys working with students of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds preparing for post-secondary studies. In addition to having taught English for almost 20 years in Canada and abroad, Marina has also developed curricula in academic reading and vocabulary acquisition, two areas of special interest. Marina was born in Ukraine and moved to Israel, where she graduated from Bar Ilan University with an M.A. in English and a Teaching Diploma. She is the author of Step Up to Academic Reading (OUP Canada, 2012).

Oxford Advanced Learners (Oald) Paperback CD-rom Pack - Oxford
Step Up to Academic Reading - Marina Rozenberg

Special Features

Authentic, multi-disciplinary readings, many of which are excerpted from undergraduate textbooks, engage students with post-secondary subject matter.
Canadian content is combined with readings from international sources to offer a diversity of perspectives on current Canadian and global issues.
Flexible structure allows instructors to move easily between skills instruction and reading practice, and to choose the most relevant reading units based on students' abilities and interests.
An innovative approach to reading practice encourages students to consider material from multiple perspectives and assess it critically in the Unit Reflection and Synthesis section at the end of each reading unit.