In this episode, we’ll give you some advice on how to improve your reading skills in English. Whether you’re reading for pleasure or for academic purposes, we’ll give you some tips on how to do it better.
Please forgive the delay in replying to your emails, voice messages and ideas that you sent during the summer.
Just to remind you that we record episodes in advance and we are usually away for several weeks in the summer, so we can’t always reply promptly.
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Voice message from Ricardo who asks how he can improve his reading skills.
We gave some recommendations in episode 177 (the episode’s about writing an email to tech support but we speak a lot about reading and give book recommendations) Harry Potter, Animal Farm. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Angela’s Ashes.
Any books by Ernest Hemingway, Neil Gaiman, George Orwell and Bill Bryson. Comics, short fiction and graded readers.
1.Practice! Practice! Practice!
2. Find content that interests you and try to read a wide variety of different text types.
3. Read a book in English that you’ve read previously in Spanish
Don’t check all difficult words with a dictionary. Guess from context.
For good intermediate level and above students (with time), read a book first in English, then in your language (Spanish), then in English again! This way, try not to look up any words at all in a dictionary. By the time you read the second time in English, you might understand everything without having looked up anything, or very little! Also, your understanding of new words/phrases will be much deeper this way.
(Reza did this with Don Quijote, but the other way round – to improve his Spanish. In other words, he read first Spanish, then English, then Spanish again, resisting the urge – as much as possible – to look up those difficult, old-fashioned Spanish expressions Cervantes uses. It took some time, but he got real satisfaction out of deducing a lot of very difficult new vocabulary correctly, without having to check in a dictionary.)
4. There’s a difference between relaxed reading and reading when preparing for an exam.
5. Read a paragraph, close the book and note down important points. Re-read the paragraph. Did you miss anything? Are there any difficult words you want to look up? (especially good for academic reading)
6. Develop a reading habit (10-15 minutes every night before you go to sleep)
7. Watch the film first then read the book – Nick Hornby (About a Boy with Hugh Grant / High Fidelity with John Cusack and Jack Black / Fever Pitch with Colin Firth). The Great Gatsby
8. Join a reading club or Facebook group
9. If you’re a teacher, start a book review podcast with your students!
Resources
A list of books to read: https://www.goodreads.com/list
Free books in return for your reading data: https://www.jellybooks.com/
Earn money ($5-$60) if you read and review a book: https://onlinebookclub.org/
Adaptation of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain: http://cuadernodeingles.com/
Mansion Inglés reading section: http://www.mansioningles.com/Lectura01.htm
Cómo mejorar la lectura en inglés: http://www.mansioningles.com/como-mejorar-lectura-ingles.htm
Visit our online store: https://store.mansioningles.net/
…and now it’s your turn to practise your English.
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