English for Computer Science, Reading Skills, Intermediate Level, Second Edition

Welcome to the second edition to ENGLISH FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE: READING SKILLS, INTERMEDIATE LEVEL! This new edition is the product of extensive revision and evaluation, not only by myself and my students, but by the many instructors who, along with their students, have used the previous edition and have contributed valuable suggestions and comments. The success of the previous edition has been due, in large measure, to the honest and careful appraisal given by language instructors and their students.

            ENGLISH FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE, READING SKILLS, INTERMEDIATE LEVEL, is an  intermediate reading course for computer science students. It focuses on the actual needs of students at this level for
vocabulary expansion and reading skill-building. It is designed for use in EFL adult-education programs, universities, colleges, technical schools, and language institutes.

             ENGLISH FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE            is made up of ten
thematically-based units, each of which is divided into two parts. Vocabulary-building and skill-building exercises accompany each reading. Each unit consists of a brief pre-reading exercise and an exercise on skimming or scanning.
Following the reading passage itself, there are post-reading exercises that focus on important reading skills: getting the main idea; understanding the reading’s
structure; understanding meaning from context; recognizing contextual reference; finding the topic and topic sentence; understanding general and specific ideas; understanding signal words; making an outline; and understanding cause and effect, comparison and contrast, classification, inference, etc.

            Each part of the unit concludes with a discussion question designed to encourage students to think about, distill, and discuss the information they have read about throughout the unit. Sometimes the discussion deals with a topic from outside the reading. An important goal of ENGLISH FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE is to help computing students to become confident readers by increasing their
vocabulary base and improving their reading skills. It engages them in the
process of reading thoughtfully and encourages them to move beyond passive reading.