Frank Robin Miller

Supplementary book: an Overall Course for Students of Science and Technology Frank Robin Miller

This booklet is designed for freshmen engineering students who have to get prepared themselves for fulfilling the demands of academic texts comprehension. It is divided into units which involve four main sections that include understanding oral discourse or listening activity, understanding a text, speaking practice and writing. The first section is focused mainly on the listening comprehension skill which is based on the identification of the speech acts that characterize the scientific discourse and also on the work in the semantic level. Reading Practice deals with language improvement exercises, centering the students' attention on the acquisition of scientific terms, recognition of language cues and identification of speech acts. Speaking practice aims at the students' participation in different activities for the discussion of the linguistic material presented. Different active methods are suggested in order to carry out the work in this section. Writing in technical professions requires the knowledge of the process of writing. The students will be guided so that they can write either descriptive or informative summaries.