Academic Reading in Practice 4219-ZP007

Academic Reading in Practice is a course that develops students’ ability to read actively, effectively, and critically at the university level. It teaches essential skills such as decoding, comprehension, inference, reasoning, making connections between their preexisting knowledge and new information, and developing coherent argumentation based on cultural, literary, and historical texts, as well as political science and sociology discourse. At the same time, the course increases students’ awareness about the process of reading and its connection to critical thinking and writing. Exposed to texts from various disciplines, students also learn the fundamentals of style, form, and rhetoric. Academic Reading in Practice is a course that enhances the skills of deep reading and teaches students how to approach texts that might initially seem too difficult to fully understand. Students will learn how to do a close reading of texts representing a variety of disciplines and genres – political speeches, historical accounts, modernist fiction, memoirs, genre fiction, poetry, neuroscience, philosophy, or critical theory. Additionally, they will work with different voices, registers, and discourses operating in such texts, and learn how to work through boredom and/or apprehension with a sustained focus.

The course is divided into 4 major parts:
1. Reading strategies (effective preparation for an in-class, text-based discussion; reading for nuance; enhanced understanding of the functions and goals of reading)
2. Deep reading and focus (strategies for improving and sustaining focus; practical exercises; the functions of deep reading).
3. Embodied reading (reading and emotions, developing a better understanding of one’s reading responses; neuroscience of reading)
4. Critical reading and cultural contexts (introduction to discourse analysis; the functions of literature and limits of representation; genres, forms, and styles; critique/criticism v. “criticizing”)