English as a Second Language - ESL 60

Course Description

This course for English-language learners is the first in a guided series of ESL reading and vocabulary skills classes. This course, taught in group and language lab settings, concentrates on reading and vocabulary development to foster adaptation to a new culture for personal, academic and professional purposes. Students will develop fundamental reading and vocabulary building strategies to build basic comprehension, efficiency and fluency.

Prerequisites

(A requirement that must be completed before taking this course.)

Course Competencies

Upon successful completion of the course, the student should be able to:

• Develop basic critical reading strategies such as previewing, connecting the text to self and the world and scanning for answers.
• Predict the topic and main idea of a passage through the strategies of previewing and prior knowledge.
• Recognize connections and reading text markers, such as referent pronouns.
• Identify main ideas in literal, controlled texts.
• Distinguish supporting details from main ideas in literal, controlled texts.
• Draw basic conclusions and inferences in literal, controlled texts.
• Organize information from reading passages in visual graphic organizers, such as a basic timeline.
• Describe basic information gleaned from two separate texts.
• Summarize basic information from graphics and visuals.
• Generate short answer responses to readings.
• Develop basic vocabulary building skills, including use of fundamental context clues and prefixes, with beginning use of a monolingual dictionary.
• Apply basic rules and strategies of test-taking.

Course Schedule