Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Recommended: CASAS reading placement 239 or higher.

Upon completion of the course students will be able to:

• Use and understand the pre-writing and pre-reading strategies to identify, clarify, and 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 styles, ideas, arguments and themes from multiple complex sources into a written or oral response.

• Exhibit persistence, self-motivation, self-advocacy, and personal responsibility
• Reflect upon, assess, identify, and celebrate one’s own learning gains
• Explore, develop, and monitor appropriate academic and professional goals
• Advance knowledge and skills to make independent choices as a citizen, family member, worker, and life-long learner

• Complete CASAS reading test
• Pass GED Practice tests in Reasoning Through Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science
• 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, notes, writing in response in response to text,  and annotations
• 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
• ABE Advanced In-Class Reading and Writing Assessment
• Complete a computer-based assignment

Themes: Family, Citizen, Lifelong Learner, Worker. Social Studies, Science, Metacognition

Concepts :goal setting, critical thinking, decision making, confidence building, collaborative team-work, media literacy, cultural literacy, student success skills

Issues: barriers to student success, access to resources, communication skills, learning differences, test and school anxiety, and behavior appropriate to academic and professional settings
Skills:

• Awareness of writing as a process (planning, developing, organizing, revising, editing)
• Clarify purpose of the writer(s) and reader(s) in a specific situation
• Draw on prior experience, research, new knowledge, and one’s own questions, interests and observations to generate ideas
• Choose among a variety of strategies appropriate to planning and organizing texts types
• Develop and organize ideas and information in varied genres, including the presentation of an argument
• Summarize and paraphrase ideas in a text while avoiding plagiarism
• Introduce claims, acknowledge alternate or opposing claims and organize the reasons logically
• Support claim(s) with logical reasoning and relevant evidence, using accurate, credible source
• Use words, phrases and clauses to create cohesion and clarify the relationships among claims, reasons, and evidence
• Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented
• Use basic and complex grammar to construct coherent text with sentences that vary in style, length and complexity
• Draw from a broad vocabulary that includes words needed for specialized and/or academic purposes
• Express one’s own thoughts and ideas in a way that is clear and compelling
• Consider and apply feedback from self and others to enhance the impact of the writing and better address the writing purpose
• Use writing conventions appropriate for complex text types in multiple genres, including academic or occupational texts
• Proofread and apply knowledge of conventions to enhance reader understanding
• Draw from a variety of technologies and media appropriate for the writing purposes.
• Carry out writing tasks that involve presentations of information, or require the synthesis, analysis and/or evaluation of ideas
• Select the writing development strategy appropriate to writing purposes and needs
• 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 (e.g. scan/skim, make inferences, mark text and/or make notes, organize notes and/or make graphic organizers and text maps, write a summary to check understanding, discuss with others)
• Use text format and features (e.g. search engines, drop down menus, headings) to enhance comprehension
• Locate, analyze, and critique stated and unstated information, ideas/arguments, and/ or themes in a complex functional, informational, or persuasive text
• Determine, analyze and summarize the author’s central idea and major points over multiple paragraphs/pages
• Evaluate the reliability, accuracy, and sufficiency of information, claims, or arguments
• Draw conclusions related to the structural elements of a complex literary work, using literary terms
• Analyze and evaluate an authors 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
• Agree or disagree with an idea/argument/claim or theme, and explain reasoning
• Follow complex, multi step directions, integrating written and graphic information (e.g., science experiment)
• Compare and Contrast people/characters, events and ideas in different texts
• Combine, compare, contrast and/or critique ideas/arguments/claims or themes in different texts