Book excerpt: Reading German is a structured reading course designed to take a wide variety of users to an independent reading of authentic German texts. It is ideally suited for courses in colleges and universities, for students or specialists in any discipline, and for independent learners. Drawing on recent research into reading in a foreign language, the course chapters focus on the recognition and decoding of progressively complex written structures, before rehearsing a variety of strategies (suchas skimming and scanning) for negotiating longer and more complex texts. The book has four sections: a 16-chapter reading course an extensive reference section containing a specially-designed grammar of written German a further exercises section, for further work on recognizing structures a text corpus containing 23 texts of various types, with facing English translations. Grammatical points explained in the reference section are frequently illustrated using examples located in the text corpus. The only other resource the user will need is a bilingual dictionary. Advice on how to use a dictionary is contained in the reference section.