Academic Reading

This textbook focuses on developing the essential reading and study skills needed to succeed in college courses. It utilizes a unique, contextualized approach by showing students how to adapt their reading skills to various academic disciplines and career fields.

The book's goal is to not only teach fundamental skills but also to motivate students by linking reading strategies to specific areas of interest or fields of study, ultimately opening up new academic and career possibilities. The book is also supported by an enhanced digital course, My Reading Lab, which provides text-specific exercises.  

🗣️ Explanation of the Book's Content

The book is organized into four main parts, designed to transform students into interactive and critical readers:

Part 1: Fundamental Reading Strategies (Building the Foundation)

This section focuses on the basic, yet crucial, skills for comprehension:

• Active Reading: It illustrates how to become an active reader, including strategies like previewing and predicting before reading, checking comprehension during reading, and reviewing afterward. A classic system for active reading, SQ3R, may be included.
• Fundamental Comprehension: This covers how to locate main ideas (including implied ones), identify topic sentences, and recognize primary and secondary supporting details. 

How To Create an Interactive Matching Quiz with J-Match

Are your students getting bored with traditional exercises?  One simple yet powerful solution is Interactive Quizzes.  

With J-Match (Hot Potatoes), teachers can create fun matching activities that improve engagement and can easily be shared on Blogger.

Let’s learn how to create one step by step! 🚀

🌟 What is J-Match?

J-Match is a module in Hot Potatoes used to create matching exercises, such as:

• Word ↔ meaning
• Picture ↔ word
• Question ↔ answer
• Sentence ↔ response

Students usually drag or select matching pairs.

🧰 What You Need

• Hot Potatoes software (installed)
• Matching content (words, pictures, definitions, etc.)
• Optional: images or audio files. 

Let’s learn how to create one step by step! 🚀

🪜 Step-by-Step: Creating a J-Match Quiz

Step 1: Prepare all materials and the questions you need, after than Save it in the same folder.  For example belong: 

Writing Academic English

Here is a detailed review and explanation of the book, which is part of The Longman Academic Writing Series. 

Review Summary

     Writing Academic English is considered an essential and comprehensive writing textbook designed to prepare students for academic success in college. The book is well-regarded for its clear, structured, and step-by-step approach to composition.

• Strengths: It takes the mystery out of the composition process. It offers a focus on writing as a process, guiding students through the steps of prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing.
• Practicality: It includes clear models, varied practice exercises, and examples with academic content to ready students for university-level work.
• Reference Value: It features extensive appendices that provide easy reference for key writing concepts, grammar, and research information.

Functional Grammar

 

This book serves as an introduction to Functional Grammar, which is an accessible term for Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the theory of language developed by Michael Halliday.

Here is a review and explanation of the core concepts you would find in the book: 

📚 Book Review and Target Audience

The book is highly recommended for those who want to quickly understand functional grammar concepts. It is particularly suitable for university students in the field of education, especially those studying to be English teachers (pre-service teachers).

• Goal: The main goal of the book is to tame the sophisticated concepts of Systemic Functional Grammar and explain them in a simple, clear, and accessible way.
• Approach: It follows a theory-to-practice fashion, providing a balanced overview of key issues in functional grammar.
• Value: It is considered helpful for teachers, especially when a genre-based approach to  language teaching is adopted, as functional grammar forms the theoretical basis for this approach.
• Positive Feedback: Studies involving students using functional grammar units in Indonesia 

Language Component

 

There are three language component:  vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation are often cited as the three key components for developing proficiency in a language.

Here is a breakdown of what each component involves: 

1. 🗣️ Pronunciation (Phonology)

This component deals with the sound system of the language.

• Definition: It is the study of the sounds (phonemes) used in a language and the rules for their combination and accepted production.
• What it includes:
• Individual Sounds (Phonemes): Producing the correct vowel and consonant sounds.
• Stress and Intonation: Placing emphasis on the correct syllable in a word (stress) and using the proper rise and fall of the voice in a sentence (intonation) to convey meaning.