Improving Reading (1)

Source: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/reading-in-foreign-language/

Round 1: Get the gist of the passage

On the first pass through, read for the gist. Just get a sense of what the text is about and a general feel for what’s happening. Don’t get too hung up on words you don’t know. However, depending on how opaque the passage is, you might have to look up words here and there even to get at the overall meaning.

Round 2: Go over in more detail, looking up words you don’t know

Pass two is the bring-out-the-toolbox-and-take-this-thing-apart round. This is when you do want to get hung up on the details, looking up all words you don’t know and making sure you understand how the grammatical structure of the text is working. This is when you break the thing down into its parts and figure out how each of those parts works.

Round 3: Put together all the new details you understand

After breaking the passage down into its details, you now want to put those details back together into a unified whole. This pass through the text is about synthesizing everything you learned in pass two about what individual words mean and how the grammar fits together.

You can think of this stage as reading for the gist, like in step one, while incorporating all the new information from step two. You want to read quickly enough to get a birds eye view of the whole passage, but do take enough time to integrate most of the new knowledge you gleaned form step two.

Round 4: Do a final recap, aiming for speed

In the fourth and final run through of the text, speed is the name of the game. Now that you’ve broken down the text and put it back together, the idea is to go through grasping the meaning as quickly as possible. Try to push yourself on this one, both in terms of holding onto the things you learned in step 2 and getting through the passage faster than you thought you could.

5. Read Aloud

When working on reading, it’s helpful to keep in mind that reading is really just an extension of speaking and listening. This fact is key to making reading the easiest thing you do in your foreign language studies.

One way to take advantage of the link between spoken and written language is to actually speak and listen while you read. Just speak whatever you’re reading out loud to yourself as you read it. When you make connections between listening, reading and speaking, all three will improve.

6. Do “Less Slow” Reading

If you want to keep yourself on your toes and challenge your brain to parse the words you’re reading a little more quickly, try some timed reading activities. Speed reading doesn’t need to be your goal, just reading less slowly than you used to and setting new personal bests is the most important thing.

You can do timed reading either by setting a timer while you read so you can see how long it takes you to get through a given text and calculate your reading speed in words-per-minute, or by giving yourself a predetermined amount of time to complete a passage.

Besides pushing your brain to process the text you’re looking at a little faster, “less slow” reading will add a little excitement to your reading practice—which is never a bad idea, since boredom is the death of language learning.

7. Use Context

Context is the best language teacher you’ll ever have. Think about it: You learned your native language entirely from context.

When you’re reading, always try to take advantage of context as much as possible. Whenever you reach a word you aren’t familiar with, force yourself to guess its meaning before reaching for the dictionary, then look it up to see if you were right.

This is actually a good tip for all aspects of language learning, but it’s especially important for reading exercises, where you can find yourself reaching instinctively for the dictionary over and over. Forcing yourself to guess things from context turns language learning into a puzzle of sorts, and you’ll have a stronger memory for the words you can guess correctly from context than the ones you have to type into Google Translate to understand.

It can seem intimidating to be confronted with a wall of text in a language you still have a tenuous grasp on, but if you use strategies like transferring your foreign language speaking and native reading skills, balancing relaxed and focused reading, starting a reading group, reading out loud, re-re-re-reading and taking advantage of context, you’ll see that reading in a foreign language is a skill that just naturally gets better with time if you let it.

And if you ever find yourself getting frustrated, just remember—you’ve already learned to read English, you can do anything!

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