Korean Job Discussion Forums

[canukteacher]

Anyone out there have any experience teaching a reading course to uni students? I would be interested in hearing what books you used, and how you assessed your students. I have some ideas, but have never taught reading before. All ideas will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

CT

[Zark]

There is a great book out there called "Strategies for Readers" that would fit well for most college level readers in Korea. Covers all the basic reading skills including skimming, scanning, surveying, quessing meaning, predicting, speed, etc etc - as well as a lot of discrimination practice for similar meaning words and similarly appearing words. Even gets to outlining texts by the second book.

I used it in an EAP program in Saudi Arabia for five years and found it quite productive.

I believe I have seen it at the Young Pong Bookstore. Book one has a red cover, book two a white one.

I am assuming that your goal is to teach reading SKILLS - not reading appreciation or some such.

[the_beaver]

Just finishing off a reading course now. The class was full of advanced students so I gave them a lot of leeway, but nearly all of the books they chose were bestsellers and they each did at least 700 thousand words worth of John Grisham, Dan Brown, the Shopaholic series, etc. One student read Shogun and a few read some fantasy books.

I read all of the books the students read (fortunately I had read may of the books before, but still, I've read about 30 novels this semester). Students had to hand in weekly reading logs, do 5 quizzes over the semester, and now they're meeting me for interviews. This class was independent study but if I teach it again I'll assign groups of students the same book and have them discuss their books in class.

In the same class (I split the class into high and low levels) the low level students read Judy Blume's Fudge books and with the exception of Sheila the Great, they really liked them.

[SuperHero]

You might want to check out the extensive reading yahoo group.

[bluelake]

At the university where I teach (Handong Global U. in Pohang), we have a completely academic English curriculum (not conversational). One class in our core is called English Reading and Discussion; in that class we use the book The Reading Edge (Houghton-Mifflin). The book works well. It is a challenging class for Korean students, as the material was intended for the American university classroom, but our students do pretty well with it.


T

[Scott in Incheon]

When I have taught reading in the past, I taught a number of metacognitive reading strategies. Many of them were created for at risk readers in the West and others to help college students read better. If you do some searches for metacognitive reading strategies or just reading strategies, then you should find some that you can use in your class.