Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
On today's episode, I want to focus on reading and how reading can help you improve your English abilities.
If you don't know, reading is part of input.
Input is how much you listen or read to a foreign language.
How much input you receive directly correlates to your skills in that foreign language.
The more you read and listen, the better your fluency in English is going to be.
That means you should be reading and listening to English as much as possible on a daily basis.
But how do you do that?
What reading strategies should you use and what should you be reading?
On today's episode, we're going to answer these questions for you so you can use reading effectively to increase your English fluency.
Before we begin, I just want to remind you that in the description of this episode, you will find a list of the words and phrases that I use so you can incorporate them into your learning and start using them in conversation yourself.
Let's talk a little bit about reading and why it is so important.
Reading helps you build your vocabulary.
I've heard from a lot of students that they feel frustrated when they are speaking in English because their vocabulary feels limited.
They feel like they only have a limited amount of words that they can use to describe situations and that they use very simple grammatical structures.
When they listen to native speakers, they hear all of these other words, they hear complex sentence structures, and they want to mimic them, but they feel like they can't.
When people tell me that, I always ask them how much input they are doing and how much reading they are doing in English.
Reading is important if you are trying to build your vocabulary.
That goes for people who are learning English as a second language, but also for native speakers.
It has been shown in studies that native -speaking English children, the more that they read, the more vocabulary they have.
Reading is very important to get you to be exposed to all of the words that are in the English language.
There is an infinite number of words.
You are never going to know every single English word.
I don't know every single English word.
Even though I have a very high level of education, it's impossible.
However, the more that you read, the more words that you are exposed to, the more your vocabulary is going to expand.
When you read, you also get to see the complex native structures of sentences, and you can start using them, and you can feel more confident when you use them, the more practice you have, the more times you see them, the more your brain is going to learn those patterns, and the easier it is going to be
for you when you are trying to speak in English and replicate those patterns.
Let's talk about the two main strategies for reading.
The first is intensive reading, and the second is extensive reading.
Now, the difference between this really has to do with the amount that you are reading and the amount that you are able to understand.
Intensive reading is a reading strategy where you read closely with the text.
This means that you stop when there are words that you don't understand, you try to learn those words that you don't understand, and you are really trying to comprehend 100 % of the material that you are learning.
This is different from extensive reading.
Extensive reading is when you are trying to read as much as possible.
This is sheer volume.
This means that you don't stop when you don't fully understand a word, you keep going, and you keep reading.
The goal here is to just be exposed to as much as possible, to try to see if you can follow along with the story, and just naturally try to see if you can understand what you are reading.
Maybe you don't know the vocabulary word, but if you can read the context, if you can read the story, maybe you can reason it out and just understand it based on what is happening around it.
I will say that these are very different reading strategies.
Intensive reading takes more time.
It's an intensive practice.
You're going to go slower when you're reading because you're going to try to stop and learn the words as you're going along.
Extensive reading is a lot quicker in that you're not stopping, but you are using that time instead to be exposed to as many words as possible to increase the volume or the amount that you're reading.
Even with native speakers, these two reading strategies can be used.
I teach at a high school.
If this is your first time watching this, you might not know, but I actually do teach at a high school, and I teach high school students, most of whom are native speakers.
When we are talking about reading, when I give my students an article to read, what we usually do is that we have them read extensively.
We have them just read the article, and then we have them go back and look for specific new vocabulary words that they highlight, that they underline, and that is a way that we use both of these strategies at once.
We have them read the article extensively, which means that we just have them read through the article the first time.
Then we give them a specific prompt, like go back and box new words or highlight new words, and then they go through and they reread it again intensively.
This is a way that you could use both strategies.
Of course, it means that you're interacting with the same material twice or maybe even more times, you might go back again.
However, it does mean that you're using both of these strategies and you're kind of getting the best of both worlds.
You can go through and see how much your brain can just naturally pick up when you're reading it the first time through.
Then you can go through and double check and read intensively and see how that changes and see what new words you can pick up that way.
You can also switch between these two strategies as you progress with your language learning.
When you are brand new, when you have a zero vocabulary and you are just starting out with a new language, you probably want to read extensively.
You probably want to try to read as much as you can because you want to get exposure to the language.
If you have zero vocabulary, if you're brand new, that means every single word is new to you.
You probably don't want to stop for every single word.
That would be very time intensive.
That would take you a lot of time if you stopped and looked up the meaning for every single word along the way.
You want to start off with extensive reading, get as much exposure, get repeating words and phrases, and that way you can start to build your vocabulary.
However, the higher you get in your progression with the language, that means when you get to an intermediate or an upper intermediate stage, you want to start switching over to intensive reading.
That means that you want to start interacting with the text on a more closer level.
This is because when you get to an intermediate level, you're probably having a decent comprehension of the language.
You can probably understand from context clues what a word or phrase means.
You probably have a pretty good understanding.
However, you want to really start adopting those words and phrases into your own vocabulary.
You want to start learning a lot of native level vocabulary phrases, idioms, sayings, specific vocabulary for specific instances.
This is also because when you are reading higher level text, you are not getting the same repetition that you get when you start with low level text.
When you start with beginner text, words and phrases tend to repeat over and over and over again.
When you get to more native level content and more specific content, that means that your vocabulary is less repetitive.
To get the same level of retention, you really need to study those particular words, those particular phrases, and that specific vocabulary.
This means that you're reading more intensively because you're trying to look up the meanings, the phrases, and incorporate each individual unknown word into your vocabulary system.
Personally, how I read in the app that I use to read with is called Link.
You can find Link on the website.
There is also an app version that you can get for your phone or your tablet.
I will leave a link below in the description so you can check out the Link website or app if you're interested.
A little bit about Link, it was co -created and developed by Steve Kaufman.
Steve Kaufman, if you don't know, he's a polyglot.
He has a YouTube channel.
I'll also link to his YouTube channel so you can check out his videos.
He gives a lot of great advice about how to learn a language and he is one of the big proponents of input about reading and listening as much as you can to a foreign language to increase your vocabulary and your fluency.
The Link app lets you import lessons, so that means you can upload e -books, YouTube videos, song lyrics, articles from websites, and you can read them on the app.
The app will highlight any new words for you when you're going through and if you click on them, the definition for the word will appear on the screen.
That helps a lot when you're trying to read intensively because you can quickly see the meaning of the word.
You can also group words together so you can get the meaning of different idioms and different phrases.
The app also tracks the words that you don't know and highlights them for you in a different color so when you continue reading, you can see what words are not necessarily new but still unfamiliar to you.
You don't know fully the definition and you can see them when you're reading and you can change the rating.
You can change it from completely unknown to known and you can see how your vocabulary progresses while you go through.
The app also tracks how much time you spend listening and reading and it tells you how many words you have in your vocabulary.
Personally, I find this app really helpful.
I like being able to see what my vocabulary level is, how many words I know, how much I've interacted with the language.
It really helps keep track of all of that data for you so if you're one of those people who really likes tracking how much you're interacting with a language, that's a great app that you can use.
Finally, let's talk about what material you should be reading.
We've talked about the strategies.
We've talked about what app I personally use to read with but what material should you read?
If you are just beginning, you should be using material that is made for beginners.
These are usually called graded readers and they have very limited vocabulary, an easy sentence structure and a high amount of repetition.
That means you see the same words and phrases over and over and over again so you can learn them.
There is a lot of material for beginners, especially with English and this is usually the easiest part of your language learning journey because you have so many resources, so many things that you can use that are made for beginners.
Graded readers are usually marked with what level they're for.
They might say beginner, intermediate, advanced.
They might also be marked with the common European framework for language learning.
This framework uses A, B and C to specify what level they're at.
A is for beginner, B is for intermediate and C is for advanced.
There's also ones and twos for each of those steps.
So there's an A1, A2.
A1 would be very, very beginner.
A2 means you're beginner but a little bit more advanced.
Then B1 and B2 for intermediate and C1 and C2 for advanced.
C2 means native level really.
It means very, very advanced in a language and that would be the most difficult material.
If you're just beginning, you want to start with A1, eventually get to A2, then B1, B2, etc.
When you are just starting out, these graded readers help a lot again because of the repetition.
However, once you start moving into that intermediate stage, you want to start looking for material that's made for intermediates and not beginners.
If you just stay with beginner material, it eventually gets too easy.
You're not really getting any new vocabulary and it becomes a waste of time.
That means while you are going with your language journey, you constantly want to challenge yourself and you want to find new material that is slightly above your level.
You want a little bit of struggle.
A little bit of struggle is good.
If you feel completely lost when you're reading the material, that's not good.
You don't want to feel like you don't understand anything, but you do want to have a certain amount of words, a certain amount of phrases that are brand new to you, so you're constantly learning new vocabulary as you go along.
Intermediate material is probably one of the hardest to find.
That's why I made this podcast that has its list of vocabulary in the description below, because beginner material is really easy to find.
Native content, especially in English, is extremely easy to find, but that intermediate phase when you can't really understand a native speaker but you also are past the beginner stage, that's the part where the struggle really is the most difficult and it's the hardest to find material.
However, once you start getting more advanced, you really want to start reading those actual news articles in native English.
If you're in the United States, there's a lot of different news channels.
You can go to CNN, ABC, NBC, all of those are great resources.
They have news articles on their sites.
These articles are usually not too long in length and they're also usually written at about an eighth grade level.
Now, eighth grade level, that usually means around 12, 13 years old, so someone who is that age can probably read it and understand it.
News sites do this so that the articles are easily understood by people who are reading them, and that means it's a great resource for you that you can use when you are at that intermediate level, because those articles are written at a native level, but they're still easier to understand.
Now, if the article involves an interview with someone and you see quotation marks and a quote from someone, you might also get some slang in there.
You might also get some idioms and phrases, and that can help you, especially with your conversational English.
There's also aggregate sites that pool news articles from a bunch of different sites and put it all in one place.
For example, Yahoo is a site that does that, and you can find links to a bunch of different articles.
That means that there's a lot of different topics, a lot of different material that you can use depending on your interest, and again, it's a great way to help increase your vocabulary.
If you're able to find sites that also have audio as well as the transcript, that is really ideal.
When you listen and when you read the text at the same time, you're learning how a native speaker pronounces their words, what their intonation is, what the rhythm is when they speak, and that can help you improve your pronunciation and your conversation skills when you are trying to speak with a native speaker.
If news articles are a little bit too short for you or maybe a little bit too boring, you want to start incorporating more fiction into your reading, you can also use graded readers at this stage.
If you go on Amazon or if you go online and you just search intermediate English graded readers, you will find stuff.
There's a lot of authors who write graded readers for the intermediate level, and again, this is another great resource that you can use.
When we're talking about using native level content, you want to look for books that are, again, around the middle school level, around that seventh and eighth grade level, around teenage or pre -teen age, as we would say in the United States.
Think of your teenagers having to save the world type story.
Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent, all of those are youth literature, we would say.
We call them youth literature, which means it's made for people who are around the age of 12 to about 15.
This level is going to, of course, be easier than literature that is written specifically for adults, and there is a lot of books for that age range.
Again, just think of the ones that I just mentioned, those are all major Hollywood pictures.
They're all based off of books that are written for that specific audience, and if you read them, you're going to get a lot of native level vocabulary and phrases and sayings.
I know I feel like I'm repeating this a lot.
You might think that I'm repeating this a lot, but again, that's really the goal.
You want to get native level content.
You want to be able to start pulling in those resources when you can, and that youth literature, that level that is written for preteens and teenagers, is a great way to start incorporating fiction into your reading.
When you get to the upper intermediate and lower advanced level is when you can get even more native -like content.
You're still looking for stuff that might be a little bit easier to understand, and these type of fiction books are going to be the ones that are maybe a little bit more simplified, maybe not as complex, maybe not the ones that are full literature mode, but kind of an easy, fast read.
In the United States, these are usually books that are put on a summer reading list.
Summer reading lists, the idea is that these are books that you could take to the beach or you could read by the pool.
They go relatively quickly.
They're not super long, and they're an easy read when you read them.
If you're at the upper immediate, lower advanced level, these are good books to have in your range.
You're probably going to be able to understand them, but still be exposed to new grammatical structures and new vocabulary.
If you don't want to read fiction books, a fiction book is not really your thing, you can also use opinion pieces by news articles.
So if you go to websites, news websites such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, even CNN or the BBC, they usually have an opinion column, the opinion piece.
If you click on opinions, these are usually written in a different style.
Now, regular news articles that are giving you facts are more simplistic because it's supposed to be a fact -based writing.
You're not supposed to be getting the author's opinion, you're just learning the news.
When you read opinion pieces, these people are trying to persuade you and they're trying to make an argument.
Because of that, they're using more persuasive language, which usually uses a lot more analogies, a lot more idioms and phrases, and it's going to have a lot more adjectives because they're trying to use more powerful language.
When you are at a lower intermediate level, that might be very difficult to understand, but again, as you progress, as you get to that upper intermediate, lower advanced opinion pieces are a great resource because you're getting more vocabulary and a different style of writing than you would get in a fact
-based news article.
Of course, when you get to the advanced level, then you really can go crazy.
You can use any resource because you're going to have such high comprehension.
You can read native -level novels, you can read any author, you can read opinion pieces, and you're going to be able to understand them, maybe still find some new vocabulary.
You can really hear some new phrases, see some new structures, but when you get to the advanced level, that's really when the whole world opens up and you can pick any content that you would like.
I hope this episode helped you with reading.
I hope you learned a little bit about the different strategies you can use, what tools you can use, and what material you can use based on what level you are at.
It is important to constantly challenge yourself.
Look for new material that follows your interests, that you enjoy reading, but that also increases your vocabulary and gives you exposure to more words in English.
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Until then, keep learning English.
