This course presents a wide range of authentic reading materials including newspapers, journals, reviews and academic texts in order to comprehend contrasting viewpoints, to predict and identify main ideas and to decode suprasentential clues. It also aims to equip students with intensive and extensive reading habits. Critical thinking skills such as synthesizing information or analysing a problem as well as reacting on the basis of evaluation are fostered. Such sub-skills of reading are employed by the students in their writings. Students also analyse and produce different types of writings (e.g. expository paragraph, descriptive paragraph, narrative paragraph, etc.); build up writing skills emphasizing the organization, coherence and cohesion and such sub-skills as summarizing, outlining, and paraphrasing at paragraph level. The use of spelling and punctuation conventions as well as non-alphabetic symbol use will be practiced.