3707. For Learning a Language - Reading Is like Half the Pathway Trodden

 A lot of us people want to learn a language – I teach English and keep learning it! – and we have to practice all four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. 

For me and many of us listening may be the most difficult skill to acquire, but with practice you do improve a lot, believe me. 

Anyway, today I would like to tell you especially about reading. Reading books, articles, websites. And also believe me, it’s a great skill to practice. 

Stephen Krashen stated that by reading books you can learn a great deal of a second or foreign language, and I can assure you it’s thus. I have no big problems to read any text in English: fiction, non-fiction … except Joseph Conrad’s books perhaps, for they show to be extremely difficult for me to understand – even I had an Irish friend, Connor by name, who told me also that for him it was tough to understand, and he said that he read like one page per day, of his books. It’s curious, Conrad was Polish by birth and became a great savant of English over time, and he used a very rich vocabulary, amazing. 

Well, I can read (almost) any text or book in English. My dear students – they’re adults – struggle much to read and enjoy and understand Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) in an unabridged version – they’re aces anyway – and some of them are striving hard to read and understand Oliver Twist in a B2/C1 level edition (upper intermediate/low advanced), published by Oxford University Press. But there they are, with a tremendous war to untangle the book along its chapters. Amazing too. 

Something I do when I come across a word I didn’t know- or a phrase – is kind of taking a mental picture of it and try to learn the word or phrase, and I can assure you thus you get to increase, enhance, and improve your lexis. 

I guess I’ve developed kind of a skill to read, enjoy, and understand what I read, even like a fluent language (for reading I mean) which helps me to improve the other three language skills – for example when I watch a video in English from the textbook we use in class or from YouTube, you know, I get to understand more and more; also when I listen to a radio station on the Internet. Great thing, thank God. 

Well, if you’re a second or foreign language teacher, at any level, I would encourage you to recommend or assign reading books, good ones that may help your students become greater persons. Have a nice day, fellow readers.

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