Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

I have designed this class to help you improve your overall reading skills in English. We will be using a novel to build your endurance in reading.  You will need to purchase the novel for the course if you choose to use a paper copy during our course. The novel is called Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz, and you may purchase your own personal copy on Amazon. You can also read the novel in a free PDF version by clicking on the link here( Esperanza Rising. )I am also adding the link for an audio version for a read-along practice Esperanza Rising Read-Along Audio . The novel is relatively easy to read, so you should not heavily rely on using your bilingual dictionary. You will be asked to pay attention to 10 carefully selected academic words, and you are encouraged to skip other unknown words or use strategies to figure out the meaning of these words from context as you locate main ideas and supporting details. I will be sharing the reading units with you in Google Docs to focus on developing specific reading skills by applying relevant strategies. I am aware that many of these strategies are already familiar to you, but your goal for the term should be to further sharpen these essential reading skills. Also, we will work on summarizing texts and reflecting on the content of reading materials. My ultimate goal for the term is to help you further build your confidence that you can read any text in English without a dictionary!

This is an in-person class, but you will need a personal computer to access the Google Docs that you will be using over the course to complete assignments. You will need to submit your work by sharing these documents with me, and I will give you feedback on your work in these documents as well. If you do not have a laptop or a tablet, make sure that you request one from the PCC library.