This course is designed to develop competent and strategic readers who are able to read and comprehend popular articles and short stories (about 2000-word long) both textually and contextually in terms of topics, main ideas, supporting details, and text organization, either explicitly or implicitly stated. The class activities focus on developing their reading strategies at both language and text levels, i.e. analyzing word meaning, juxtaposition, and diction; analyzing grammatical forms to comprehend a text; recognizing meanings expressed in different grammatical forms; identifying the topic and the main idea from supporting details; distinguishing between explicit and implicit information; interpreting culturally-bound meanings; understanding discourse markers; analyzing the organization and development of a text; identifying text types; exploring and interpreting short stories in terms of type, point of view, introduction, plot, character, setting, ending, and theme.