A course in teaching reading strategies

Abstract

The current project aims at developing and enhancing reading skills and vocabulary knowledge of the students of International Relations at Yerevan State University. This is an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course and is built around political and diplomatic texts through which the students will learn advanced reading skills for general comprehension, including identifying specific information, paraphrasing and inferring word meanings from context. The follow up activities built around texts are similar to TOEFL/IELTS reading section questions, which will prepare students for further test taking. Twenty-five third and fourth year students from the Faculty of International Relations at Yerevan State University with a proficiency level of intermediate and upper intermediate took part in the survey. The survey and the focus group interview revealed that many of the post graduate level students in third and the fourth year still had difficulties with text comprehension, scanning and skimming techniques, and other reading strategies. In addition, the preferred strategy often used by the students was the translation method, where finding equivalents in L1 while reading was considered the only option. Thus, the project design targets at creating a course book, which focuses on reading strategies (skimming, scanning and guessing from context). The book consists of nine units for twenty-two teaching hours. It comprises of texts on current political and diplomatic issues with follow up activities that develop all four skills through reading.