Reading Skills for the Social Sciences

This is an intermediate course for university students in social science courses such as politics, history, economics, sociology and psychology, who need to be able to read quickly and effectively in English. The course covers grammatical and stylistic features of academic prose in various forms, including book reviews and research reports. It also provides practice in the reading and study skills that university students require, such as scanning, skimming, extracting information and note-taking. Each of the ten units of the book contains the following sections: approaching the text, intensive reading, language work, vocabulary work, word building and observations on text type. Included are exercises on lexis, word-building and recurrent linguistic features of academic prose such as modal verbs and conjunctions.