 Welcome to this video on reading content in English. As an EMI instructor, you will want to be aware of the needs your students have regarding reading and understanding content in English. In order to make meaning from a text, students need to know most of the words, understand the grammar structures, and have at least some background knowledge about the topic. This video will discuss needs assessment for students' reading skills and the five subskills involved in reading. Doing at least a brief needs assessment regarding students' reading proficiency is helpful. One way is to ask students to write a brief summary in their own words of an assigned text, either in or out of class, and in their native language or in English. Be sure you choose a text that is similar to readings you have for your class in topic, vocabulary, complexity, and grammatical complexity. Having students write a summary will give you an idea of the vocabulary they know, and also if they are able to understand the main idea of the text. Another option is to give students a brief, ungraded quiz. Questions need to be written carefully, though, so that you focus on main ideas and not unnecessary details. And you'll have to decide if students can look at the reading when they answer the quiz or not. A third option is to have students read a text for homework and discuss it in small groups in class, asking each student to share at least three or four points. The benefit here is that students can communicate about main ideas, but at the same time it might be unrealistic for the EMI instructor to hear all students in this format. All the same, these are some options in getting information about how well your students read and understand text in English. And remember that students reading comprehension in English may be stronger or weaker than their skills in listening or speaking in English. So what is reading anyway? Reading is a word that actually refers to several sub-skills. The main ones include these five. One, reading in detail. This refers to a reader being able to figure out the main idea of a text and also any relevant details. The reader also needs to understand how the main idea and details work together to build meaning. For example, the reader needs to be able to identify how many main ideas a text has and how many details or examples the writer included. EMI students need to be able to read in detail and still focus on the main ideas so they don't try to remember every small thing. They should remember the big main points and a few examples or details of those points. EMI students will need their instructor's help with this. Two, scanning. Scanning refers to being able to look quickly over a text and find specific information. For example, when you go to a restaurant and look for certain foods like desserts or a fish dish, that's scanning. You don't read every word. Instead, you search quickly for the section you want and then you read more carefully. With EMI courses, students will need to be able to quickly scan texts in order to find what they are looking for, such as key terms and examples of those terms or answers to comprehension or discussion questions. Students will likely need at least some in-class training with scanning so that they don't just read all the words too carefully and forget what they're looking for. Third, skimming. Skimming refers to being able to look quickly over a text and get the main idea of the text. It's different from scanning because with scanning, you are looking for specific information and you probably slow down and read carefully when you find the section you're looking for. With skimming, you are looking for main ideas. EMI students will benefit from skimming a text before they start to read it in detail more carefully. This will allow them to create an overall outline in their minds of what the text is about. They might also look for key vocabulary terms while skimming that they think they should review before reading the text in detail. Next, identifying opinions. Identifying opinions refers to readers being able to figure out if a sentence or section is a fact or if it's someone's opinion. This is important in content learning since if a student gets confused, they might think something is factual when it isn't. Facts are things that can be proven to be correct and opinions are things that people believe to be true or not true cannot be proven. Common words that represent opinions are think, believe, seem, good, better, worst, or should be.