Building Academic Reading Skills teaches the academic reading skills that are most useful for college and university students. Building Academic Reading Skills offers pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading development activities in all units and for each reading within a unit.

Because today's readers need to master a large volume of texts and vocabulary presented in different genres and disciplines,  Building Academic Reading Skills is organized by a high-interest topic and features multiple readings from different academic disciplines. Units contain both textbook readings and readings from other genres because students are increasingly reading newspaper, magazine, journal, and online articles in addition to their textbooks. The readings, while adapted to be accessible to high-intermediate to low-advanced students, are not easy. However, through the systematic application of the reading skills, students will be able to understand them and apply the information they learn. Students will gain the satisfaction of having engaged and mastered challenging texts.

Book 2 includes the disciplines of film studies, sociology, physics, literature, chemistry, genetics, bio-engineering, environmental science, zoology, urban planning, biology, and education