Reading is a crucial skill when becoming fluent in any language. It is one of the best ways to increase your vocabulary, while strengthening your ability to recognize and use proper grammar. Here are a few tips and tricks on how to become a better reader in English.
First, it’s good to practice Skimming texts. Skimming is the action of noticing key words and ideas in a text while reading very quickly. This is something you do in your native language when trying to decide what to read. It lets you know the main ideas before you get into the work itself, and you don’t have to worry yet about difficult words or phrases. To practice Skimming, you should look at the title of a book or article, glance through a few paragraphs, enough to get an idea what it’s about. You should only take a minute or so doing this.
Next, you should try Scanning. Scanning is when you look through a text for specific information only. So, say you want to find the specific numbers in a text. You can skip over anything that’s not a number. In this scenario, you’re not really reading so much as searching for information. This skill is useful when you want to know something quickly, like what time the next train will be, or what year the author was born.
Another practice is to try reading without stopping for unknown words. If you read a sentence and 70% of the sentence is gibberish to you, then you should try translating. But if you can read a paragraph and understand most of it, don’t stop for just one word. Read the text all the way through and then go back later to look up unknowns.
