Academic Reading in Science: Reading Skills for Students of English as a Second or Foreign Language

Academic Reading in Science teaches reading skills to university level science students studying English as a second or foreign language. Students learn how to identify topics and main ideas of texts, understand the functions of logical connectors, and learn how to identify the organization of a text. In addition, students also learn about restatements, definitions, prefixes, roots and suffixes, and guessing word meanings from context. While learning these skills, students also study the five hundred and seventy word families of the academic word list. Academic Reading in Science is a workbook. Students learn by practice - lots of practice. There are comprehension questions, gap fill and matching exercises, and many supplementary materials. The science coverage is also very broad and interesting with over two hundred short authentic text articles on everything from acceleration to zinc, and last but not least, the appendices are excellent. Here, students can find comprehensive lists of all the academic words families, discover the function of logical connectors or signal words, learn the meaning of prefixes and suffixes, or even look up a word in a concise dictionary of the academic word list. All in all, Academic Reading in Science is a very valuable resource for serious science students studying English as a second or foreign language.