This course is designed to develop competent and strategic readers who are able to read and comprehend short popular articles (about 1500-word long) 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. comprehending the meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items, analyzing grammatical forms to comprehend a text, recognizing meanings expressed in different grammatical forms, skimming for general information, scanning for specific information, distinguishing between explicit and implicit information, identifying text types, inferring relationships between ideas that are made salient.