Welcome.
You may be thinking, "Why are there reading classes at a college?
Don't college students already know how to read?"
Sure they do. But the reading demands placed on college students
are unlike almost any other kind of reading adults will ever do. As
a result, most colleges and universities in America have been offering
reading courses for more than thirty years.
Actually, the average adult reads at a seventh grade level. Newspapers
and magazines are nearly all written at seventh or eighth grade reading
levels; however, college textbooks will obviously be written at much
higher levels. If you usually read only newspapers, magazines, or
novels, your reading skills may not be in shape for college reading.
Probably at no other time in your life will you have as much reading
to do as you will have in college, unless you go into law or medicine.
To be successful, you may need to brush up those reading skills in
order to handle the intensive, extensive reading required in most
college classes. In fact, we have found that about 50 to 90 percent
of college students need to take brush-up courses of some kind.
Top
The English Department at the Virginia Beach campus of Tidewater
Community College regularly offers three reading courses designed
to prepare you for the reading assignments you must do in your college
courses. Of course, none of these reading courses deal with beginning-level
reading skills because we know that you know the basics. What we do
is teach you strategies and concepts which you will be able to use
in your college classes and even in the work world.
As in any brush-up course, you will find that you already are familiar
with many of the strategies and concepts we cover, but we will refresh
your memory in some cases and strengthen your skills in other cases.
Although you may be familiar with the subjects we cover in our reading
classes, they are not the type of classes in which you can just read
the book and pass. We use class time primarily for learning and practicing
the strategies, and the quizzes and tests are designed to reflect
the class work. We have a lot of success with our reading classes,
and students who participate in class will become better college readers.
We believe that we have some valuable reading and study skills to
offer you, and we look forward to meeting you in one or more of our
classes.
Robyn Browder,
Associate Professor of Reading
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a
dog it's too dark to read. --Groucho Marx
