Tribhuvan University, Open and Distance Education Centre (ODEC)

Course Description

            Readings in English (Part I) is an advanced level reading course which builds on Interdisciplinary Readings (Eng. Ed. 517) of the first semester. The course has eight units. It consists of advanced academic texts, which are organized under various themes; namely, education, literature, art and culture, contemporary issues, human conditions, literary essays, short fictions, poetry and long fictions; while literary texts are organized under various genres of literature. The different types of the texts expose the students to the content knowledge and strengthen their linguistic resources useful for communication to the wider readership. The course presents the best of authentic academic and literary texts by the prominent authors from diverse geo-cultural and political backgrounds. The course seeks to explore the cross-disciplinary links and their relevance to the contemporary world.

General Objectives

            The course aims at helping students/teachers to enter into a world of varied reading materials within the given themes and genres. The goal is achieved by reading authentic materials extensively and by producing their analysis and interpretation. The course also aims at integrating the threads of these two skills: Reading and Writing back up by Critical Thinking. The reading dimension expects the students to process knowledge and linguistic resources while the writing calls for the manipulation of these resources for the production of their won knowledge. By the end, the students will be enabled to access a wide variety of materials on their own and write creatively and evaluate on a variety of topics.

Given these general objectives, the students will be able to:

v   Enter into the contemporary world of- art, film, music, translations related to the books so that they can develop skills of appreciating the contemporary literary art form expressed in different ways;

v   Develop their taste through interdisciplinary media so that this serves as motivation for language learning;

v   Develop their ideas about elevated and formal styles, and use the same in reading and creative writing skills;

v   To critically observe literary and non-literary texts prescribed for different levels of academic (teaching) institutions; and

v   Find out and employ in their own writing the literary devices like symbols, metaphors, similes, alliteration, allusion, allegories, etc.