Reading for a Reason
Enhancing Reading Skills
Laurie Blass and Elizabeth Whalley
high beginning to intermediate
This new three-level academic theme-based
reading series focuses on
cross-curricular content and
promotes critical thinking skills.
Features
• Reading selections span fiction, non-fiction, news and magazine
articles, interviews, maps, charts, web pages, quotations, and
photo captions
• Reading passages reflect controlled word count and vocabulary and
structure progression
• Skills are continually recycled to build student reading fluency,
confidence, and mastery
• Units
open with engaging
photographs and questions to
introduce the theme, provide academic focus, set chapter
goals, and activate prior knowledge
• Before You Read activities stimulate
background knowledge, focus on vocabulary presentation and
practice, and introduce important expressions
• As You Read sections focus
students on the main idea, offer timed readings to build
fluency, and provide pair work activities to promote topic
discussion and information processing
• A
specific section in each unit focuses on Internet research
• Structured speaking activities help students further explore each
unit theme
• Each unit
concludes with three
writing activities—two
structured paragraph exercises and one topic-of-choice exercise
