Essential Reading Skills, 4th edition

Essential Reading Skills, with its acute focus on what is quintessential to reading success, improves students' reading ability through concise instruction, guided practice, and skill application.

Each of the eleven chapters in Essential Reading Skills focuses on a specific reading and thinking skill.  The instruction is kept short, permitting students to master the reading skills through exercises and applications.  

Essential Reading Skills is the lower-level text in a two-book series, with Active Reading Skills as its higher-level alternative.

• A pointed focus on only the essential college reading skills guides students on a straight path to reading success.  
• Extensive practice with exercises, review tests, and mastery tests provide skill application, repetition, and observable, measurable evidence.
• A four-color, visually appealing design keeps students engaged and helps them to take away important points.
• Ten additional readings at the end of the text provide students with more skill-application practice and instructors with flexibility in choosing readings appropriate to the students' needs.
• Vocabulary enrichment exercises are found at the end of every skill chapter.
• Test-taking tips in every chapter help students prepare for and to pass key exit exams.
• A writing component after each mastery test expands students’ thinking about the reading and their own learning to prepare them for future college courses.

• More resources have been added to aid students' college readiness:
• A new “Preparing for College Textbook Reading” section at the beginning of the text offers students practical help with important study skills.
• The new “Preparing for College Textbook Reading” learning aid in every chapter uses examples from college textbooks to demonstrate how specific textbook elements relate to the chapter content.
• A new chapter, Chapter 2: "Reading and Learning from Textbooks," teaches students the skills they need to effectively read college textbooks, including the SQ3R learning-study method, highlighting, outlining, mapping, and summarizing.
• The new College Mini-Reader contains six readings representative of the academic disciplines most students study.
• The new “Test Your Mastery of Learning Goals” interactive chapter summary tests students to see how well they have learned and remembered the most important information in the chapter.
• Chapter 9, "Reading and Thinking Critically," has a new section on how to evaluate the content, accuracy, and timeliness of Internet Sources.