By the end of the course students will be able to

-    use relevant reading strategies (i.e. skimming, scanning, previewing) according to different text and task types

-    infer the underlying meaning of a given sentence or parts of an academic text

-    identify key ideas, points of reference, types of figurative speech and writer’s technique in an academic text

-    distinguish between facts and opinions in an academic text

-    guess the meaning of unknown words in an academic text

-    use different types of dictionaries (i.e. bilingual, monolingual, collocation and thesaurus)

-    recognize the relationship between ideas in a text and between multiple texts

-    break down complex structures into meaningful chunks

-   understand syntactical relations among the parts of long complex structures

-    initiate and maintain discussions

-    express opinions clearly

-    respond to questions

-    listen for specific information

-    use correct, appropriate language structures, vocabulary and discourse markers in written and oral production

-    write unified and coherent academic paragraphs (expository and reaction) and essay (expository)

-    carry out the stages in a process writing approach during writing paragraphs and/or essays