Academic Reading & Writing - Science & Technology
This course will review basic reading strategies and skills; it will also help you to develop text awareness (e.g. inferring meaning of unknown words & dealing with complex sentences); produce a literature review by developing your critical reading ability and improving your note-taking and summarising skills; and raise your awareness of reading organisation. The course also develops your academic writing, focusing on different skills, working at both the sentence and paragraph level and helping you to avoid plagiarism.
This course will be based on texts related to Science, Technology, & Medicine. Although the reading skills covered in the course are fixed, you will be able to negotiate the topics for most weeks.
Tutors will expect you to discuss in pairs & small groups so you can think about issues related to your own academic reading and writing. These courses follow a `50% fixed core + 50% negotiated syllabus´, based on an `options menu´/Learning Outcomes. Negotiation should take place in Week 5.Tutors may ask you to prepare for class by reading texts (usually journal articles) before the lesson. Sometimes you will be asked to bring a text from a journal in your own subject area.
READING LEARNING OUTCOMES
Skills and Strategies
At the end of this course you should be better able to apply basic strategies such as:
- Reading with a purpose
- Surveying a chapter
- Using first and last paragraphs
- Understanding Scientific writing style
- Reading maths
- Understanding writer purpose and attitude
- Multiple reading skills e.g. Prediction, skimming
- Reading strategically
Graphics
Understand and use graphics
Textual Awareness
Strategies for dealing with unfamiliar words and for extracting meaning from complex sentences by developing textual awareness will be encouraged throughout the course.
Students will be better able to identify and understand the implications of:
- Dealing with unfamiliar words
- Cohesion and Text Organisation
- Comparing information from more than one source
Critical Reading
At the end of this course you should be better able to:
- Make notes
- Summarise
- Evaluate degree of certainty, writer’s purpose and conclusions
- Interpreting and using data in literature reviews
Organised Reading
At the end of this course you should be better able to:
- Reference/keep records
WRITING LEARNING OUTCOMES
At the end of this course, you should have improved your ability to:
- Write a lab report
- Write effective introductory and concluding paragraphs
- Write an abstract
- Summarise academic texts related to general science and students’ specific areas of science (Paraphrase, cite and produce accurate bibliographic entries; Select and order information; Synthesise ideas from a range of sources)
- Describe and explain facts and figures, e.g. graphs, statistics, equations, theories and scientific laws and principles
- Use specifications (measurements, SI units) related to your area of study
- Describe proposals, plans and methodologies appropriate to scientific experiments
- Write in an impersonal style
WRITING OPTIONS
At the end of this course, you should also have improved your ability to do some of the following:
- Use appropriate verb tense according to section type (e.g. reporting own research vs. reporting generally accepted research)
- Edit own writing
- Learn how to approach exam questions
- Use language of comparison, similarity and difference effectively
- Express proportion
- Express ideas in a tentative manner
- Use effective punctuation (: ; ,)
- Defining, classifying and exemplifying
- Describing development and change
- Describing processes
- Describing cause and effect relationships
- Describing location and spatial relationships