IV. Conclusive remarks:

In this way we have come up with the idea of academic reading defined as purposeful critical reading of a range of texts placed in certain subject areas, which requires careful synthesizing of sources with subsequent extensive and intensive reading for information retrieval. It is expected to be profound and comprehensive in terms of its content peculiarities based on interpreting critically explicit and implicit information, inferred and deduced from the context in order to achieve a deeper understanding and a fuller appreciation of the retrieved information: you learn to see more, to uncover or create richer, denser, more interesting meanings. Readers are given opportunity to read actual selections from a variety of publications putting forward global in nature issues.

What is more, background knowledge of related topics embedded in texts is activated by the options following the reading passage, which are intended to bring about overall reading proficiency, inferring ability, using the vocabulary appropriately, as well as critical thinking. In the light of the given material it should be assumed that it is possible to build up common conceptually constructed frameworks and expectations, into which a reader fits the text by interpreting it. This provides the essential foundation of processing information so that a proficient reader can begin to achieve the highest goal of reading.

Glossary of helpful key words:

Acquisition a subconscious process like effortless mastery of language through being exposed to.

Activate/activation is based on putting learning into action in the course of completing the task.

Appropriacy choosing language that is not just correct but also appropriate to the situation.

Authentic used to describe texts written for native or competent speakers of a language.

Cognitive effort is when a person is encouraged to think about what he is working on.

Coherence organization of ideas in a logical way.

Cohesion lexical or grammatical with the help of devices sticking things together.

Colligation combination of words on condition of grammatical valency.

Collocation two or more words occurring together on condition of lexical valency.

Comprehension act or power of understanding.

Communicative activities are those where a person activates language to communicate real meaning.

Connotation is the impression that a word gives beyond its literal meaning.

Content the information and meaning rather than the language.

Context describes the environment (topic and linguistic) in which a word or phrase occurs.

Cross-cultural communication act of communicating representatives of different cultures.

Cue kind of signal (stimulus) for understanding.

Cultural appropriacy is when a topic suit certain culture.

Cultural background the culture(here means country, region or social group) that a person has grown up or lived.

Critical reading are activities aimed at making judgments or expressing views on the content of a reading passage.

Decoding means finding the meaning of something written in code.

Discourse communities are any groups of people that share ways of communicating in terms of established routines, formats, etc.

Discourse markers items of language indicating relationship between what went before and what comes after.

Elicit when we try to get information (often implied).

Engage\engagement the involvement of learners through curiosity or rmotion.

Extensive reading where a person reads texts, often specialized, which are longer than typical passages.

Feedback reactions to activity types.

Follow up activities to keep the conversation going.

Formal is a term to describe elaborate language used in situations where politeness and tentativeness is expected.

Heading word or words printed at the top of the written material to show the subject of what follows.

General English type of English for a wide variety of possible uses.

General understanding similar to skimming so as to get the gist of text.

Genre a style or type of discourse identified by discourse features, register and layout.

Genre analysis is when we study different examples in order to find out how texts are constructed within that genre.

Gist the general idea of a text, whether written or spoken.

Glean information gather details in small quantities.

Inference this is the meaning we get ‘behind the words’.

Informal is a term to describe relaxed, friendly easy-going language.

Intensive reading is when we read the text immediately and meantime discuss detailed aspects of meaning.

Interaction acting on each other.

Intention thing intended (aim, purpose).

Keyword is an essential, basic, fundamental word.

L1 (first language) a speaker’s main language.

L2 (second language) often used to describe the language which the students are learning.

Layout kind of format how material is presented.

Lexical cohesion is when words are used to bind a text together.

Lexis/lexical anything to do with vocabulary.

Literacy ability to read and write.

Linkers are words or phrases which connect ideas.

Multiple choice is when we choose between three or four possible answers.

Narrative is the word used to describe writing or speaking that tell a story.

Objectives are what we hope to achieve.

Paragraph organization the order in which sentences are put together within a paragraph.

Prediction the process of someone to trying to anticipate what they will see in reading.

Presupposition something required as condition related to some social situation or culture.

Proficiency being skilled in reading.

Reassembling a text a type of activity aimed to put scrambled paragraphs into correct order.

Reading for detailed comprehension means going through a text to focus on language, meaning or text construction.

Reading for pleasure is reading which is done for fun.

Register describes the choice of words in a text on the basis of topic.

Response is what happens when you react to a cue.

Scan is to look over a text trying to find some specific information.

Skim is to read a text to get the general meaning or gist; different from ‘scan’.

Stance means the person’s intellectual attitude.

Subject matter plot, topic of a reading text.

Signpost language words or phrases indicating direction of development of narration.

Tone means the attitude conveyed by the author’s choice of words.

Topic the subject of theme of a reading text.

Topic sentence the sentence within a paragraph which tells the reader what the paragraph is about.

Reference literature:

1.Akhmanova O.S. What is English We Use?/ Olga Sergeyevna Akhmanova. – М.: из-во МГУ, 1978.

2.Adams G. 101 helpful hints for IELTS Academic module/ Garry Adams. – Sydney: 2000.

3.Curriculum for English language development in Universities and Institutes. – Kyiv: 2001.

4. Dijk Teun A. van. Discourse Semantics and Ideology// Discourse as structure and Process. – London:1997.

5.Nuttall C. Teaching reading skills in a foreign language/ C.Nuttall. – Macmillan: 2000.

6. Harmer J. How to teach English/ Jeremy Harmer. – Longman: 2007.

7. Stephens M. New Proficiency Reading/ Mary Stephens. – Longman: 2002.

8. Smith L. Topics for today. An advanced reading skills text/ Lorraine Smith. – Heinle Publishers: 2002.

9. Хрестоматия по английской филологии \ ред О.В.Александрова. – М.: Высшая школа, 1991.

10.http://www./ang.uiuc.edu/r-li5/ESL projecr/es/beg.htm/

11.http://www.nationalreadingpanel.org/publications/summary.htm

Dictionaries:

12.Oxford ESL Dictionary/A.S.Hornby. – Oxford University Press: 2001.

13. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. – Longman: 1995.

TOPIC 1: General Account of the Grammatical Structure of the English Language under Theoretical Analysis

1.1.Levels of the grammatical description. English Grammatical Theory was historically developed within originally three linguistic schools, dependent on linguistic approaches and methodology of the grammatical analysis, namely: Classical Scientific Grammar (H.Sweet, G.Curme, E.Kruisinga, H.Poustna, O.Jespersen, F.Zandvoort, C.Onions); American Descriptive Grammar (started with E.Sapir and L.Bloomfield, continued by Ch.Fries, Z.Harris, W.Francis, K.Pike, R.Wells, E.Nida); Transformational Grammar (Z.Harris, N.Chomsky, P.Roberts, E.Bach, O.Thomas). Whatever linguistic science might be, its interest is centered on the insight into systemic character of language, with the grammatical system as its constituent part. It follows that Grammar, focused on the grammatical description of language, is aimed to present an outline of the grammatical system, i.e. to define grammatical categories and analyse the mechanisms of grammatical formation of utterances out of words in speech making. In the other way, grammar incorporates such notion as grammatical structure of language, defined in terms of a coherent dynamic system, with constituents related to one another (a morpheme, a word, a phrase, a sentence), reflecting the body of grammatical units and the regularities of their use in the process of sentence production. In this respect, Grammar is mainly concerned with principles of sentence formation that include the ways in which word forms with definite morphological categorical distinctions are arranged to create a phrase and a sentence, originating finally a text as the highest communicative unit. The text is made up of sentences, which are termed as meaningful communicative units, integrating phrases; phrases are defined as meaningful non-communicative structural units, integrating words, as nominative units, being built up by meaningful segmental components, morphemes, formed by phonemes and indivisible as to their function. Hence, the aspects of the grammatical description can be drawn up as the following: text-level, sentence-level, phrase-level, word-level, morpheme-level. As regards these features, Grammar is divided into Morphology and Syntax. The subject matter of Morphology is the grammatical classes and groups of words, their grammatical categories and systems of forms (paradigms), in which these categories actually exist. Syntax studies sentence-building, i.e. ways of connecting words and word phrases into sentences giving a rise to the text.

The type of grammatical structure of a language, synthetical or analytical, is dependent on the ways of expressing grammatical relations between words in word-groups and sentences. Take an example of synthetical Russian with the grammatical function of a word being expressed by inflection or affixation, and suppletivity. (For details see page 5-6).The extent to which Modern English makes use of inflection and suppletivity is scarce, if compared with Russian (e.g. works, worked, go/went, am/is/are, I/me, good/better). Being an analytical language, English has gradually developed other devices to perform the same function (говорю – am talking; пришел – has arrived; прочитаны – had been read). The distinctive features characterizing English as a mainly analytical language are the following: comparatively few grammatical inflections (ed; s/es; er/est; ing); scarcity of suppletive grammatical forms (be, were, me, worst, went); a wide use of functional words (auxiliaries, articles, prepositions) to create grammatical forms and to connect words in a sentence (will be taking, have been writing, much more interesting, the country, a chair, the title of the book, arrive at the airport, is keen on music);a more or less fixed word order to denote grammatical relations.

The distinguished number of analytically built grammatical forms makes the specific peculiarity of English as an analytical language: e.g. is translated, has been studying, will be running, more interesting, less expensive, could have bought, ought to arrive, etc.

1.2. Basic notions of the grammatical description (Grammatical form, grammatical meaning, paradigm, category).The word as a grammatical unit has its form (grammatical form) and meaning (lexical and grammatical). Grammatical forms of words are typically constructed by morphemes, added synthetically, or structurals, added analytically. Number: book – books, family – families, leaf – leaves.Case: my sister’s children, the title of the book, the students’ papers. Aspect: was drawing – drew, repaired – have repaired – have been repairing. Degree of comparison: cold – colder – the coldest, difficult – more difficult – the most difficult, less interesting – the least interesting.

By grammatical forms we understand variants of a word having the same lexical meaning but differing grammatically.

There are the following ways of changing grammatical forms of words:

The use of affixes as word changing morphemic elements added to the root of the word: e(s) (the plural of nouns, the possessive of nouns, the 3^rd person singular of Present Simple); ing (Present Participle, Gerund); er/est (Comparative and Superlative Degrees); ed (the Past Simple of the Indicative Mood, the Subjunctive Mood, Past Participle); sound change as the use of different root sounds in grammatical forms of a word, which may be either consonants or vowels (e.g. speak – spoke, crisis – crises, write – wrote, wife – wives, analysis – analyses); suppletivity as creating grammatical forms of a word coming from different roots (e.g. far – further, he – him, bad – worst, was – been); analytical forms being made up of two components: a notional word used as an unchanged element carrying a lexical meaning and a structural changed grammatically but expressing no lexical meaning (e.g. will be reading, can sing, will be able to translate, would bring, less expensive, the most beautiful).

Grammatical forms being on the plane of expression (form) and possessing morphemic features, expressed either syntactically or analytically, convey certain grammatical meanings being on the plane of content (meaning) shaped in morphology as meanings of number, case, degree, voice, tense, etc. The system of grammatical forms of a word is called a paradigm with paradigmatic lines, the elements of which build up typically the so called privative morphological opposition based on a morphological differential feature (synthetical or analytical) present in its strong (marked) member and absent in its weak (unmarked) member. Compare: zero::Ved; zero::shall/willV; zero::Ving. Of minor types is an equipollent opposition (person forms of the verb ‘be’: am – is – are) and a gradual opposition (zero::adjer::adjest). Thus a grammatical paradigm is represented by the opposition of marked and non-marked members specifically connected with paradigmatic relations in order to express number, tense, mood, case, etc. The general grammatical meaning of two or more grammatical forms in a paradigm opposed to each other generates a grammatical category. The evidence is seen in the following examples:

the word forms ‘student, book’ denote singularity, while ‘books, students’ denote plurality; as opposed to each other in the paradigmatic series, they have one grammatical meaning, that of number; thus the opposition of grammatical forms makes up the category of number;

the word forms ‘swims, is working’ indicate reference to present including the moment of speaking, whereas ‘swam, was working’ indicate reference to past excluding the moment of speaking; and the opposition of grammatical forms in the paradigmatic series having the grammatical meaning of reference to the moment of speaking makes up the category of tense.

Taking into account the given assumptions, the grammatical category is defined as a system, expressing a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms, analytical or synthetical, which make the specific peculiarity of the language.

Key words:

levels of grammatical description уровни грамматического описания

constituent part конституирующая часть

grammatical system грамматическая система

grammatical formation of utterance грамматическая организация высказывания

grammatical structure of language грамматическая структура языка

coherent system целостная система

morpheme морфема

word слово

phrase фраза

sentence предложение

grammatical unit грамматическая единица

word form словоформа

morphological морфологический

categorical features категориальные признаки

parts of speech части речи

communicative unit коммуникативная единица

structural unit структурная единица

nominative unit номинативная единица

segmental сегментный

Morphology Морфология

Syntax Синтаксис

subject matter предмет изучения

paradigm парадигма

grammatical structure of language грамматическая структура языка

synthetical ситетический

analytical аналитический

inflection инфлексия

affixation аффиксация

suppletivity суплетивизм

grammatical form грамматическая форма

grammatical meaning грамматическое значение

grammatical category грамматическая категория

functional words функциональные слова

auxiliary вспомогательный глагол

article артикль

preposition предлог

fixed word order фиксированный порядок слов

grammatical relations грамматические отношения

Number Число

Case Падеж

Aspect Вид

Degrees of comparison Степени сравнения

root of the word корень слова

plural множественное число

possessive притяжательный падеж

3^rd person singular 3 лицо ед. число

sound change чередование

analytical form аналитическая форма

notional word знаменательное слово

paradigmatic line парадигматический ряд

privative morphological opposition привативная морфологическая оппозиция

strong (marked) member сильный\маркированный компонент

weak(unmarked)member слабый\немаркированный компонент

equipollent opposition эквиполентная оппозиция

gradual opposition последовательная оппозиция

paradigmatic relations парадигматические отношения

tense грамматическое время

mood наклонение

case падеж

singularity единичность

plurality множественность

reference соотнесенность

Practical assignments