You might not notice that you are already using a range of reading styles in everyday life. In English learning, reading can be considered as the first and the most frequently used skill out of reading, listening, writing and speaking. However, when it comes to reading for study, many English learners still feel inconfident.
Here are a few methods to improve English reading skills you might want to check out.
First of all, you’d better have yourself a reading goal. Depend on what you want to use reading skill for, there will be different strategies to apply. For example, reading for exams or research will definitely be different from reading for mere entertaining purpose.
Once you have a reading goal, the next step is making time to read and finding the right materials. Reading for fun can be done anywhere. If you want to practice reading for study purpose, you need to make a special time for this to avoid interruption. There are two things to keep in mind in order to find the right material: what you are interested in and what your reading level is. That means you should read things that you enjoy and choose books at the level just a little bit out of your comfort zone to push yourself enough to learn new things, not to get frustrated with the reading. If you’re still wonder which book you should read then you might want to check Listopia on Goodreads or Jellybooks for suggestions from people just like you.
Besides of books, you can read other kinds of texts of any topic as well. Find your favorite magazine, follow some interesting people or inspiring websites for their daily feeds. With this so called extensive reading by Paul Nation, you can read a wide range of texts and meet various types of words in different themes to broaden your vocabulary.
When it comes to narrow reading, you should stay within a single topic to reduce the total number of different words that you meet, build up a lot of useful content knowledge that makes reading easier and so will make guessing unknown words’ meanings easier. If you already have a large vocabulary (6000-7000 words) it may be more effective for you to read a wide range of topics to gain more variety of words.
The next method we can do to improve English reading skills is the repeated reading in order to increase the reading speed after each repetition. It can be done by reading aloud or silently. When doing this activity, it is important that the text being read is fully understood (of course not every single word but the whole meaning of the text) since reading fluency must involve comprehension.
Paul Nation also suggests reading practice by intensive reading, which means repeat reading the same texts at least three times, paying attention to different aspects of the text on each repetition. This kind of activity first helps us become familiar with the content, after that we can pay attention to how the language is being used to convey messages. Especially, if you do this reading out loud you can also practice the pronunciation, listening and speaking at the same time. Try to focus on pronouncing every word well and carefully.
The last but not least, to improve English reading skills, make sure that you dedicate time to practice reading at least 30 minutes every day since practicing makes perfection.
To conclude, these above methods can be applied not only for English learning but also for your native language in term of increasing your reading efficiency. Therefore, read more English whenever you can.
Here goes a saying by Hazel Rochman to encourage reading habit that I would like to end the writing with “Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds home for us everywhere”.
To improve your English reading skills, why don’t you try using eJOY Extension? This tool will help you learn new vocabulary fast and easily. You can look up any new words and save them to learn later when you practice reading online articles. So good, so easy!