New Directions

New Directions is a thematically based, integrated skills reader designed to bridge the gap between ESL and college content courses. By providing reading and writing assignments representative of real college classes, New Directions challenges students to expand their horizons. Through extended, integrated reading, writing, speaking, and listening activities, students learn to generate hypotheses, argue, analyze critically, and distinguish between different types of writing and purposes for reading. Moreover, New Directions helps students develop such crucial skills as the ability to identify a writer's point of view and tone, interpret a writer's meaning inferentially as well as literally, and discriminate between opinion and fact. The text also teaches students to detect fallacies in reasoning, to reach conclusions and judgments based on supportable criteria, and to propose new ideas.