Summary

Reader's Choice is among the world's best loved and most successful ESL/EFL textbooks for the teaching of academic skills. Based on the theory that proficient reading requires the coordination of a number of skills, this classic text recognizes that the most important of these is the reader's ability to select the proper skills or strategies to solve each reading challenge. The exercises and readings in Reader's Choice help students to become independent, efficient readers.

Each carefully selected reading is accompanied by a wide variety of exercises. Skills-focused units alternate with units centering on full reading passages. Reader's Choice, Fifth Edition, preserves this proven format and popular readings while bringing new material and updates to every unit from the previous edition.

New in this edition of Reader's Choice:

§ Visual Literacy. Today's students are confronted with a dizzying array and combination of print and graphics. This edition features more activities that develop strategies for gleaning information from combinations of text and graphics.

§ Web Work. The ability of today's students to evaluate information sources is nowhere more crucial than on the Internet. Extensive Web Work appears in three skills units and additional web-based activities occur throughout the book.

* New Readings. Nine new reading selections respond to the changing environment faced by our students, taking up issues of globalization in a multicultural, multigenerational world.

§ Additional Vocabulary and Additional Skills. New readings bring additional vocabulary with new lexical items topically related across a series of linked readings. Additional skills work includes reading longer passages and creating prose summaries for Paragraph Main Idea work and transferring data from prose to tables and from graphs to prose. Some vocabulary activities have been moved to the companion website.

Users of Reader's Choice will be pleased to find that many of the features they have used with success have been retained: intensive language-based reading practice; realistic literacy tasks based on the use of authentic reading passages; a focus on reading skills but opportunities for speaking, listening, and writing in the context of the issues raised in the readings; activities that support task-based learning; and texts and tasks that stretch and challenge students in meaningful ways.

A companion website featuring interactive vocabulary activities/quizzes is available at www.press.umich.edu/esl/readerschoice/.