Basic Reading Power

Reading Power #2

by Beatrice S. Mikulecky

Basic Reading Power, Second Edition, by Beatrice S. Mikulecky and Linda Jeffries, is a student-centered reading skills textbook with a process approach to reading improvement. Its unique structure, featuring four key sections used oncurrently, helps beginning-level students (with a vocabulary of 300 words) to become better readers in school, college, or business.

Reading for Pleasure encourages students to master new reading strategies and broaden their vocabulary. Comprehension Skills emphasizes strategic reading skills, such as skimming, making inferences, recognizing topics, and understanding sentences. Vocabulary Building offers strategies for learning new words, including personalized vocabulary lists, using context clues, and expanding categories of words. Thinking Skills provides targeted practice in inference and analytical skills. New to the Second

A two-color design featuring index tabs for easy navigation An expanded Teacher's Guide with sample syllabus Updated content, additional readings, and a unit on identifying word parts Test booklets contain reproducible black line masters to be used as additional practice or to test reading skills presented in the student books.

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Beatrice Mikulecky holds a master's degree in TESOL and a doctorate in Applied Psycholinguistics from Boston University. In addition to teaching reading, writing, and ESL, she has worked as a teacher-trainer in the Harvard University Summer ESL Program, in the Simmons College MATESL Program, and in Moscow, Russia. She is the author of A Short Course in Teaching Reading Skills and co-author of the Reading Power series.

Reviews

[Salem · Rating 3 out of 5]

ما هي أسرع وأفضل طريقة لإجادة اللغة الانجليزية؟

القراءة
القراءة
القراءة

هذا الكتاب يعطيك مجموعة من الاستراتيجيات
لتقرأ بشكل أفضل

[Sebah Al-Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book for preparing material for classes. It also has speed reading passages with a chart and all.

[salma Amer · Rating 5 out of 5]

nice

[Frances]

Teachers have to introduce a lesson plan for this month's staff meeting that implements reading. This is my weapon of choice!

[Nathan Albright · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is one of several books that are a part of series that seek to teach English to speakers of other languages. Most of this book consists of very workmanlike exercises that aren't particularly exciting but which seek to encourage the reader to improve their ability to understand writing in English. All of this is well and good, although it must be emphasized that the book has a very plain approach to understanding English that is focused on multiple choice and fill in questions. One of the strengths of the book is the way that the authors manage to connect a lot of different reading material together to teach lessons, as this allows the understanding of one story or excerpt to lead to further understanding of the next one and so on. I can see that a book with this approach that does a better job when it comes to presenting material in an interesting way would be able to do a very good job in providing compelling material. It is striking that this book (and the series it is a part of) focuses on written English given that this is not usually the most difficult aspect of English for others to understand.

This book is about 300 pages long and it is divided into four parts as well as additional materials. The book begins with an introduction. This is followed by an introductory section about reading for pleasure, which is admittedly undercut by the fact that it suggests some rather odd books for pleasure and, by definition, includes reading that the reader may not always find enjoyable (1). This is followed by a lengthy section in comprehension skills (2) that includes units on previewing and making predictions, scanning, making inferences, building a powerful vocabulary, learning to look for the topic, understanding paragraphs, finding the pattern of organization, and skimming. After this comes a short unit on thinking skills (3). After this comes a sizable chapter on reading faster (4), including units on fiction (with exercises on the Diamond family), biography (looking at two popular authors, J.K. Rowling and Stephen King), and nonfiction (giving reading on the Power Magazine), after which the book includes a teacher's guide and credits.

There are some obvious ambiguities about this book. For one, the book does not appear to advertise itself as being solely for speakers of foreign languages. Indeed, the book's contents, if one judges the book by its cover, appears to be focused on reading improvement as a whole, even for those who speak English normally. Yet when one looks at the material as a whole, the writing comprehension is so basic that this book is really not appropriate for those who have more than a fundamental understanding of the language. It is quite possible that there are (many) people whose reading comprehension is weak enough that this book would provide them with more reading power, but their reading would have to be at a very low level, as this book is really appropriate for only a late elementary or middle grade in terms of reading comprehension as this book really doesn't have advanced enough reading learning for high school or university level reading. It would be easy enough to recommend a book like this, except that there appears in this book to be more than the obvious interest of teaching people to read, but also the interest to encourage people to read with certain leftist or "progressive" biases, which admittedly sours me considerably on this book.

[Steven Shaw · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was consistently difficult to make the material interesting, much less effective. This situation was compounded by the necessity to adapt it to online lessons where the only barometer for progress is the honor system, so the impressions of the text are somewhat colored by this experience. For diligent students this can make an excellent training exercise if practiced regularly during the course of a year's time. However, even in the classroom, it is quite ineffective for non-elective courses with students who simply want a credit, but are indifferent to the knowledge and skills.

[Ramei]

it is to hart

[Andres]

check