EN 2101: Advanced Reading Skills & Vocabulary Development I
Higher National Diploma in English – 2nd Year 1st Semester Syllabus
1. Recognition of different styles of writing: descriptive, expository, narrative,
argumentative (10/05 hrs)
• Help students to
– Recognize the writer’s attitude and tone
– Identify figurative language and other elements of narrative style (e.g. plot,
character, and setting),
– How the writer tries to persuade or convince the reader and how the writer
uses reasons, examples etc. to explain something.
• Activities: Read passages of different styles and answer questions based on them.
2. Creative reading: going beyond the text (10/05 hrs)
• This level of reading will be possible only if the students know the literal meaning
of the text and have interpreted and evaluated the information; involves going
beyond the text to seek out or express new ideas, to gain additional insights.
• Activities: Reading more on the topic and gathering information, writing responding
to what is read.
3. Intensive reading (10/05 hrs)
• Read short sections to understand or study information or language use in detail
• Activities: comprehension questions at different levels. Activities on vocabulary,
grammatical and lexical cohesion
4. Integrating activities (10/05 hrs)
Activities: Writing short stories based on news items, Dramatizing a comic strip series
5. Collocation tasks: different combinations connected to verbs (05/02 hrs)
• Adverb + verb – choose carefully, verb + verb – be free to choose , verb +
preposition-choose between the things, verb+ adjective- keep something safe,
adjective+ preposition- safe from attack
• Types of tasks:
– Matching tasks: e.g. adverbs in column A with an adjective in B
– Sentence completion: e.g. put one of the adverbs into each gap in the
sentences.
6. Synonymsand their associations (05 /02 hrs)
• In order to avoid repetition, writers use words which have a similar meaning.
e.g. I could learn by heart – I started to memorize
He asked – He enquired
• Types of tasks:
– Read the text and find the synonyms
– Complete the sentences using a word that has a similar meaning to the word
underlined.
7. Working with texts to develop vocabulary: Identify/guessmeaning from context (10/05
hrs)
• Focus: Using the natural redundancy of surrounding words, obtaining clues from
grammatical structures, pronunciation and punctuation, activating background
knowledge from a topic of a text.
e.g. My father is a workaholic; he works so long and so hard that we rarely saw
him.
