How to read English texts if you want to improve your English

1. Reading for content

Normally, when reading a text, people use a strategy that I call “reading for content”. The goal of this strategy is to get the main idea of the text as quickly as possible and with as little effort as possible. To accomplish this goal, your brain will try to read as few words as possible and spend only a fraction of a second on each word.

For example, when reading the following passage, you don’t really see it like this:

To your brain, it looks more or less like this:

Here are some characteristics of “reading for content“:

1. Not seeing “grammar words” like a, the, in, of, through, that. The eye only stops at content words (main nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs).
2. Not seeing word forms: Was it look or looked? Has looked or had looked?
3. Not noticing the exact spelling. It is well known that the brain recognizes whole words, it does not analyze them letter by letter. Native speakers see the word piece all the time, but many of them still misspell it as peice, because the two spellings have similar shapes.
4. Ignoring difficult words that are not essential to understanding the meaning (here: primeval, constrictor). Who has the time to use a dictionary?

Reading for content is a great, time-saving way to extract information from printed sources. The problem is that you may not need the grammar words to understand a text, but you do need them to produce a text. So if you don’t pay attention to things like articles and prepositions, you won’t be able to use them correctly in your own sentences.

For example, here is a sentence from the opening paragraph of this article. Most learners (except those who are proficient in English grammar or extremely observant) will probably find it difficult to fill in the blanks: To accomplish this goal, your brain will try to read as ___ words as possible and spend only a fraction of ___ second ___ each word.

The above explains why some learners can read a 300-page book and still have problems with relatively basic grammar. It also explains why articles and prepositions are among the hardest aspects of English to learn. The conclusion for the English learner is that if you want to improve your production (output) skills, you will have to train yourself to notice grammar words.

2. Pause and think

Stop at interesting (not obvious) things: a new word, how a word was used, a grammatical structure, a preposition, an article, a conjunction, the order of words, etc. For example, the sentence contains the preposition at, and not on. Perhaps the sentence uses the present perfect tense instead of the past simple. Perhaps the word order is different than in your first language.

If the sentence contains a useful phrase, ask yourself: Could you produce a similar phrase yourself? Would you use the right word order? If you’re not sure, practice saying a similar phrase aloud or in your mind. The idea is to move the phrase to your “active vocabulary“.

If necessary, or if you feel like it, use your dictionary to find definitions of words in the sentence and get more example sentences. This will help enrich your “feel” of the word.

If you don’t like to stop reading (to look up a word in your dictionary or add a phrase to Supermemo), you can write down all the interesting sentences, or you can underline them in the book with a pencil, in order to handle these sentences later.

Another important piece of advice is that you don’t have to use the above strategy all the time. Reading in this mode can be quite exhausting, so don’t do it when you’re tired after a long reading session. Also, do not try to give equal attention to every sentence. Some sentences in books (e.g. long poetic descriptions) do not contain phrases or structures that are useful for building your own sentences.

Finally, the “pause and think” technique will not always make you remember the exact way to say something. But perhaps you’ll remember that this particular type of sentence is “weird” or “difficult” in English. If you remember that, it will at least make you stop before you write that sentence, and look it up instead of making a careless mistake.

I’ll now give you a short demonstration of the “pause and think” method. Here are two English sentences and the thoughts I got when reading them:

“Former President Jimmy Carter will visit Venezuela next week to mediate talks between the government and its opposition, which have been locked in a power struggle since a failed coup.”

1. “Former President” not “The former President”, so I guess we say “President Carter” and not “The President Carter”, even though we say “The President will do something” when we don’t mention his name.
2. “to mediate talks” not “to mediate in the talks” or something like that. I wonder if that would be OK, too…
3. “power struggle”? I think I’ve seen this phrase before.
4. “since a failed coup” not “since the failed coup”. The author does not assume we know about the coup. “coup”? hey, I know this is pronounced [ku:]!

3. Reading everywhere

You may feel that you don’t have time to read, but if you carry your book with you, the world will conspire to give you time. Take your book out when you are standing in line, waiting for a bus, and when waiting for service. (I have the feeling that waiters, hotel clerks, and other service personnel suddenly recognize your existence and became very eager to help when they see you reading.)