How do you get the most out of your reading time? Firstly, you should definitely try and make some time to read in your schedule. It is one of the fastest ways of language acquisition. Of course, it is sometimes difficult to find time to read in our busy schedules, but there are some tricks around that too. This article includes several activities that you can try out in your spare time. Read on for more!
⇒ Try to read a little bit of everything. Fiction, non-fiction, books, instruction manuals, newspapers, research papers, magazine articles, book/movie/food/other reviews, etc. There is something to gain from whatever it is that you decide to read. You learn not only about how language is used depending on the objective/aim of the text, but also how the formatting and other features vary depending on the type of text.
◊ Activity: in your spare time, make a list of the different formatting features that you noticed in your text. For example, if you were reading a magazine article, look at how the information in it is organised. Are there headings and subheadings? How are the paragraphs organised? What is the layout like? Read other text types and compare their formatting features with those of the magazine article. This will greatly enhance your writing skills for different types of text.
⇒ If there are any words that you don’t understand, try and decipher their meaning by reading the sentence, by seeing the context they are used in. Make a list of these words/underline them and look them up later to see if you understood their meaning correctly.
◊ Activity: if you have some spare time then try to make new sentences using the words you learned. You could also try to determine if those words are ones that can be used in regular conversations, or if they are only suitable in certain contexts and situations. This will boost your vocabulary.
⇒ Once you are finished reading, think of some questions about what you read. These will vary depending on the text you read. What was it about? What were the main points? How easy was it to understand? Is there anything that you would have explained differently or that you disagreed/agreed with? Answer these questions as best as you can.
◊ Activity: if you know someone else who read the same text as you, ask them these questions and compare your answers with theirs. Determine if there are any differences between your answers and if they are due to mistakes or just a difference of opinion. This will improve your discussion and review skills.
⇒ Try to make a summary of what you read. This could be in a paragraph format or just a list of bullet points. Cover as many points as you can remember.
◊ Activity: if you have more time then highlight/underline/mark the main points that you notice as you read through your chosen text. This will help you to keep track of your progress and also provide a starting point for you to work on your summary. It is also a great way to recap what you read.
⇒ Now, this is a little bit of my personal philosophy. Some teachers and educators will have different advice but this is based on what I have observed in many of my students’ language journey. A lot of people do not enjoy reading or are only interested in very specific texts, such as blog posts on a topic of their interest. A lot of people are also assigned texts of their ‘reading level’ that they will be able to understand. In my experience, it is best to read texts of different levels. They could be below, at or above your level. There is plenty to learn from texts that are different from your reading level.
◊ Activity: choose a text that you want to read and once you’ve finished it, make a list of things that you found difficult and easy to understand. For the topics that you had difficulty with, look for other texts on the same topic and read those and see if they explain it any better. Try to determine why the new text is easier to understand. Is it because it uses easier vocabulary and less complex sentence structure? Or are there other reasons? Read other texts by the same author and see if the other works are similarly easy to understand. If not then what makes the others different? A different and more complex topic? Or some other reason? All of these questions are a part of critical thinking and will help you to develop complex thinking and discursive skills in the language you are learning.
These were just a few ways of exploiting your reading time to its full potential. Try out some of the activities mentioned in this article and feel free to share your experience. If you do not have enough free time to read full texts then refer to this website for summaries of various books on different topics.
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