EAS Reading Course Book

 English for Academic Study: Reading English for academic study: Reading is designed to challenge and stimulate students on pre-sessional and pre-departure courses. The Course Book contains step-by-step activities written by EAP professionals at the University of Reading's Centre for Applied Language Studies. The activities are designed for use with authentic reading texts in an accompanying Source Book. EAS Reading is founded on an extensive review of recent research into EAP writing methodology, and reflects the most recent developments in language teaching for academic purposes. The 2009 edition of EAS Reading has been fully revised for ease of use. As well as a new format, the Course Book now comes with a book map, unit summaries, and a comprehensive glossary of terms. Each unit has weblinks offering additional information and activities, related to both reading skills and the topics covered in the units. A dedicated website, www.englishforacademicstudy.com, offers further teacher resources. This book can be used in conjunction with the following books in the English for academic study series, also published by Garnet Education: EAS Writing, EAS Extended Writing & Research Skills, EAS Listening, EAS Speaking, EAS Vocabulary and EAS Pronunciation. A separate Source Book contains all the texts featured in the Course Book. Key Features * The Strategies Approach includes the use of skills such as skimming, scanning, search reading, careful reading and browsing. * The Task-Based Approach attempts to mirror authentic reading demands and purposes and suggests that effective readers are motivated by the desire to acquire knowledge in order to perform a task. An accompanying Teacher's Book is also available.

Review: "Excellent selection of reading materials with some extremely valuable exercises in vocabulary comprehension and critical (evaluative) thinking." Rob Naish, University of West of England "EAS Reading proved a godsend to our university pre-sessional course. Student course evaluations of materials rose significantly after we used it." Oxford Brookes University, Oxford "I liked the integrated approach immensely." Joanna Rawlinson, Bath Spa University "The reading pack is made up of three books, two of which are aimed at the learner, and the third one at the tutor. The Course Book contains all the relevant tasks that students are asked to perform. At the beginning of each chapter students are told what they will practise and learn in the chapter. Each particular task is linked to a source text in the Source Book. The Teacher's Book provides the tutor with detailed guidance on the execution of each unit. In many ways this guidance is descriptive rather than prescriptive; therefore, a tutor can always adopt a modified approach. The book has seven chapters, each of them dealing with a topic which is of universal appeal and is sufficiently generic to be understood and discussed by EAP learners representing a range of specialisms. The topics covered by the series are: academic achievement (Chapter 1), early human development (Chapter 2), the environment today (Chapter 3), statistics without tears (Chapter 4), human activity and climate change (Chapter 5), the global village (Chapter 6), and the new linguistic order (Chapter 7). An EAP lecturer is told by the author that the book follows a dual approach: the Strategies Approach to reading (which entails the use of 'aggressive reading' techniques, e.g., skimming, scanning or search reading) and the Task-Based Approach (which aims at replication and recreation of authentic purposes for reading via which an efficient and effective reader is 'motivated by the desire to acquire knowledge in order to perform a task'. I am delighted to finally see an EAP book (and the other books in the series produced by Garnet Education are no exception) where a full use of colour has been made in all student's book. The texts and resource materials are attractively presented in colour, and this feature increases the impact of the books. In the past ELT used to be driven by an assumption that a full range of colour should only be applied with low-level learners or EFL students (cf the EFL 'Headway' series and all other EFL books, especially for lower levels). Luckily there has been a shift in sectorial practice and it appears that EAP is now ready to produce books which are as attractively presented as traditional EFL books. Needless to say, I feel that the aesthetic factor plays a very important part in learning. For this reason, the appealing design with due respect for colour gives the book, and the whole series, quite a unique selling point in this respect too. Having gone through the Teacher's Book I have realised that it can be used for training purposes by a newly-inducted EAP practitioner. Seeing that the traditional teacher training courses (be it at certificate or diploma level) still tend to focus on generic ELT aspects, and the syllabus does not allow them to cover ESP and ESP in sufficient detail, well-annotated teacher's books like this are of enormous assistance. Even in the absence of widely available ESP or EAP post-diploma courses in the UK or abroad, an ELT lecturer who wishes to become an ESP or EAP specialist can do so either by following the guidelines of teacher's books like this and, if possible, by also being mentored by an experienced EAP colleague (with whom they might co-teach certain courses or even co-deliver this particular package). The above package can be used either as a stand-alone book (whereby Reading would be taught as a discrete skill in a separate class) or in conjunction with the book on Writing." Mark Krzanowski for www.mkuked.co.uk "The writers of this set of books provide a very refreshing approach to teaching academic reading. Generally, approaches to reading emphasise comprehension, testing and practice with little advice on how to perform the task. Testing is based on questions clustered around literal, inferential and evaluative skills, focusing mainly on students' performance. These books are different. Slaght and Harben's 'middle way approach' encompasses both strategy and task-based approaches. Strategies refer to techniques students consciously apply as opposed to skills which are automated and mechanically applied. The task-based approach is closely tied to purpose for reading. For example, if the purposes of the reader is to obtain the main idea of a paragraph, tasks should be designed to scaffold this purpose, which will also determine the kind of strategy to be used. These combined concepts of strategy and task-based approaches provide the basis for the varied questions designed. These questions also provide scaffolding to aid students' understanding processes. The focus in these books is on developing students' 'competence' rather than simply testing their performance. The Source Book consists of seven units. Each unit consists of a few related texts on social issues ranging from the environment to language. Since students in an academic setting are expected to synthesise information from their readings, several short texts on a related theme lend themselves to realistic academic tasks. The Teacher's Book provides useful information on the 'practical considerations' which have informed the design of the book, without being too theoretical. This will be welcomed by teachers of reading. Concepts underlying task and strategy-based approaches with a focus on developing students' reading competence are clearly explained. This book also provides photocopiable materials which may be well received by many teachers. More importantly, the authors provide detailed notes and pointers for teachers on how they can structure the different tasks and provide the scaffolding required for understanding texts. The Course Book consists of seven practice units covering a range of tasks requiring the use of specific strategies. For text content, the students are referred to the Source Book. The introductory section of the students' Course Book states the four aspects of academic reading as reading for a specific purpose, working on specific strategies, obtaining detailed sentence and paragraph-level understanding and being able to analyse texts for their organisation. All these aspects of reading are clearly elaborated under four different sub-sections which give the student an overview of what to expect in the other units. This is followed by a section called Task Introduction wherein the different aspects of reading are introduced as tasks which demand the use of certain strategies. Two factors could have made this set more student-friendly. The first is that tasks could have been explicitly related to the different aspects of reading mentioned in the Course Book. For example, the task of predicting text content in Unit 1 could have been explicitly related to the strategy of skimming mentioned under 'Specific Strategies'. This would have further justified the writers' claim in the Teacher's Book that the 'Middle Way Approach' subsumes both the task and strategy-based approaches. The writers could also have made this connection more explicit both for the teachers and students. Secondly, the texts in the Source Book could have been included in the Course Book for students for easy reading and application of strategies. This could have been achieved by combining them into one publication. However, what makes this series refreshing is that teachers do not have to teach reading in a vacuum, based on their intuition. The book provides teachers with a theoretical basis for designing reading tasks and for teaching strategies. Teachers are also gently reminded that there needs to be a shift from testing performance to developing competence in student readers, especially in an academic setting. This can be done by designing questions which are task-strategy related. The strength of this set of books lies in the fact that it can be an excellent resource for teachers. Ideas for designing tasks can be adopted and adapted by teachers to suit their own teaching and their students' learning context. More importantly, these books show how reading can be task, strategy and competence driven rather than performance based." Chitra Varaprasad, National University of Singapore, Singapore Tertiary English Teachers Society "Teaching Cambridge exam classes has raised my interest in finding ways of helping students to read academic texts. General course books do offer the students tips on completing reading exercises. However, academic students needs a more viable approach. By this I mean that academic students need to work efficiently and determine whether the text is worth their while, so in this set of books students are led through a variety of steps such as predicting the content, identifying the writer's purposes and evaluating the level of the content. They learn to read a brief section and summarise the content, which is a great help for reviewing articles in their chosen field. This book has been written for students in pre-sessional and pre-departure courses, in other words, students possessing an IELTS level between 5.0-7.0. This bandwidth represents pre-B2 to a good C1 CEF level. The texts are from authentic sources and cover seven topics, ranging from academic achievement, human development, environment, etc. to studying statistics, the understanding of which is fundamental for academic students in reading their journals. The written tasks take into account current research into EAP reading methodology and that of modern language teaching for academic purposes. The 'middle way' approach to reading that the authors take is of a practical rather than a theoretical nature. In doing this, they have chosen to highlight strategy teaching within the realms of task-based teaching. Scaffolding takes place through comprehension questions, vocabulary work, text analysis tasks, etc. To understand the reasoning behind this 'middle way' approach, we need to review the implication behind strategy teaching and task-based teaching as well as the requirements for academic reading. We assume reading will improve via teaching and training strategies, and that the students will become more efficient at reading, but there is no guarantee. Strategy teaching does not necessarily depict a 'real-life' situation, nor in top-down and bottom-up processing can we claim that readers so rely on a list of strategies. A task-based approach is meant to reflect students' reading habits outside the classroom, but this implies then that reading strategies are actually subservient to the reader's purposes. In real-life situations, it is thought that students are motivated to read by the textual contents of an article, but the authors remind us that reading habits vary in accordance with an individual's language and culture. Consequently, students struggling in at the deep-end may lose any motivation they had. An academic reader must be able to synthesise information to fulfill the set academic tasks, develop an introductory overview of the topic to help themselves in following a set of lectures, and they need to be able to develop and deepen their knowledge of a topic (see Teacher's Book p.2). These realizations, focussed on the 'middle-way' approach, help readers to bridge the gap between reading habits in and out of the classroom and the use of strategies, thus leading them down an autonomous path towards self-monitoring. Schools interested in setting up new courses might be interested in this set of books. The authors offer four material routes: 16-week, 11-week, 8-week and 5-week courses. I could also visualise this set of books being used in an existing courses which is made up of modules. I have found the course outline to be very precise and well presented. It is, as often quoted, having students 'reading to learn, not learning to read' (Shih, M., Beyond Comprehension Exercises in the ESL Academic Reading Class, TESOL Quarterly: 26(2), 1992)." Janet Joos for the ETAS Journal 24/1, Winter 2006 EAS is an EAP series (English for Academic Study) comprising seven separate course books covering the following areas: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, Extended Writing & Research Skills, Pronunciation and Vocabulary. The books reflect the most recent developments in EAP and are based on practical experience of EAP practitioners in the classroom. Each book can be used as a stand-alone course or supported by others within the series, depending on the needs of the students. EAP is taught on all courses that prepare overseas students for study at universities in English speaking countries. Students hoping to study abroad will therefore get a head start by studying such material rather than general English. The EAS series is used on a high proportion of EAP courses in the UK and Australia (and the US version is now being used in North America). It has received widespread praise, and the in the words of a lecturer at a university in the UK: 'There is virtually nothing else that has come on the market in the last ten years that touches it.' The series has been designed for students on pre-sessional and foundation courses within an IELTS range of 5.0 to 7.0. However, they can be used for any group of students who need to improve their English academic skills within this range. The series is based on authentic reading or listening texts within the appropriate range of the students; these have been carefully selected to illustrate the skill area in focus. Free audio material is included where appropriate, featuring authentic transcripts of realistic length with a variety of accents. The Listening course also comes with a DVD. A website features a variety of teacher and student resources including interactive activities for Extended Writing & Research Skills. TESOL Spain Newsletter, Vol 34-2, 2010