Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon successful completion the student will be able to:

• Use and understand the pre-writing and pre-reading strategies to identify, clarify, and or prepare for the purpose of any reading or writing activity
• Incorporate fluency and new vocabulary into daily and academic reading and writing
• Apply a range of strategies including activating prior knowledge and cultural understanding to monitor and enhance comprehension
• Utilize steps in the writing process and apply the appropriate English language conventions to daily and academic writing
• Apply critical thinking in written responses
• Analyze, evaluate, and integrate writing style, ideas, arguments and themes from multiple complex sources into a written or oral response

• Complete CASAS Reading Test
• Pass GED Practice tests in Writing, Social Studies, Science and Reading
• Take Compass Test (if college bound)
• Create Writing portfolios, including reflections, drafts that show evidence of editing and revising
• Write paragraphs ,essays ,letters, poems, resumes, journal entries
• Graph Reading rate
• Develop projects, presentations, and debates
• Complete Reading with Understanding Diary
• Assess Comprehension with quizzes, multiple choice questions, written response and discussion questions

Themes: Family, Citizen, Lifelong Learner, Worker
Concepts :goal setting, critical thinking, decision making, confidence building, collaborative team work
Issues: barriers to student success, access to resources, communication skills, learning differences, test and school anxiety
Skills:

• Awareness of writing as a process
• Develop writing content and style in a way that serves the purpose
• Understand distinct English conventions
• Appraise own writing skills and abilities and those of others through revision process
• Revise written work from peer or instructor feedback
• Summarize and paraphrase ideas in a text
• Read regularly for own purposes
• Identify, clarify, and/or prepare for complex reading purpose
• Pronounce “on sight” words, abbreviations, and acronyms found in everyday texts and a range of terms related to areas of interest or study
• Recognize “on sight” syllable patterns/types, root words, and affixes in multi-syllabic words
• Acquire and apply meanings of most words and phrases found in everyday and academic texts, including terms related to specialized topics
• Accurately read text composed of dense or long, complex sentences and paragraphs with appropriate pacing, phrasing, and expression
• Evaluate and/or apply prior knowledge of the content and situation, including cultural understanding, to support comprehension
• Use strategies easily and in combination to pronounce and/or discern the meanings of unfamiliar words found in a complex text
• Choose from a range of strategies, including some sophisticated ones, and integrate them to monitor and/or enhance text comprehension
• Locate, analyze, and critique stated and unstated information, ideas/arguments, and/ or themes in a complex functional, informational, or persuasive text
• Draw conclusions related to the structural elements of a complex literary work, using literary terms
• Analyze and evaluate an author’s style, attending to the use of language and literary techniques and to influences on the writing
• Integrate the people/characters, events, information, ideas/arguments, themes, or writing styles in lengthy or multiple complex tests with each other and/or with knowledge of the world to address a complex reading purpose