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Abstract
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General English in Use is a course-book intended to provide undergraduate students with sufficient practice of the basic English they need for their later academic studies. The textbook will lead the learners at the elementary level to the intermediate level of proficiency in English. As there is a widespread agreement among educators that a university student needs to improve his/her vocabulary and reading ability, the book meets this need by covering various strategies and techniques for better reading and comprehension. The complex structure of texts at ESP (English for Specific Purposes) to which the students will be exposed later in their reading urged us to provide a variety of activities as well as authentic and up-to-date passages.
Each lesson in this book starts with a passage. The passages have been selected from modern English writings on a variety of useful topics to motivate the students of different fields of study and help them to grasp reading English texts and basic vocabulary as well as the writing skill. In order to enrich their knowledge of vocabulary the book focuses on the word formation process rather than memorizing a long list of words in isolation. Appendix one prepares some common roots, suffixes and prefixes for them. Students are supposed to read the texts and check the vocabulary items using a dictionary before attending the class; focus should be on using the phonetic alphabet.
Study skills such as skimming, scanning, getting the meaning from the context, use of prefixes and suffixes in a meaningful context and analyzing the text structure add to the wealth of classroom activities.
The basic assumption behind composing the exercises has been that the subconscious process of learning a language is active when the learner‘s mind is consciously occupied with challenging tasks which call for the use of language. So the exercises are designed to make the students frequently refer to the passage and focus on the context.
A complementary gram
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