Better Reading Techniques - Russell Hall

   
 

How do you practice your English reading in order to get fast and smooth results?

I? constantly amazed when I hear ESL students that have been studying for quite some time
(i.e. upper intermediate and even some advanced) struggle with their reading.
I wonder how they could be so capable with their speaking and conversation and yet still be lagging behind with their reading.

The common problem amongst such students is that they don? practice enough, and when they do practice they don? know how to do it properly and they just keep repeating the same old mistakes.

When I point out that they need to practice a piece of reading, they usually agree and accept but then they think that by reading the specified piece a couple of times that they have done enough; and to that I say NO WAY,.. it? absolutely not enough. You need to take the reading paragraph or paragraphs and read it out aloud (referred to as open reading) at least 8 to 12 times (often more) before you can start to get the phrasing, punctuation and emphasis right. Just think about how a piano student has to practice his or her scales and new music piece,- it? practiced repeatedly maybe 12 to 30 times over! So why do English students think that reading practice should be any different? The answer is that it isn? any different at all. The principle is the same, and if the student wishes to get powerful results then it has to practice reading the piece many times over to correct all the errors in an attempt to get it flowing and sounding as smooth as a piece of music. Of course this technique and practice gets easier and easier until eventually the principles and methods learned in the practice pieces then extends to every single thing that the students reads thereafter. So therefore, the student only needs to apply this technique very thoroughly in the initial stages. After that it gets easier and leads to much smoother reading.
 

 
  Block Reading Technique

This section of the post deals with the method of ?lock reading??in order to get really focused and powerful results. What is ?lock Reading?? It? simply when the student takes a block of text (this can be anywhere from one to four paragraphs contained on a single page (the ?lock??)and then goes about reading the block of text several times over as is described in the paragraph above (i.e. say 8 to 12 times). The first time is basically to get a feel for the text and to identify any words that present as being a difficulty (the student should highlight those difficult words and the practice them separately in order to get them sounding smoother), then on the subsequent readings the student begins to get more fluent by paying closer attention to punctuation and key words that can be emphasized with some light and shade of voice.
   
  Using a voice recorder

By using a voice recorder (any simple mp3, mp4 or even mobile/cell phone) the student can record his or her own readings of the block text. At first this will seem awkward and you?l probably hate hearing the sound of your own voice but it will help you a lot to listen for the mistakes and then make a written note of them so that you can correct them on the next occasions that you read the block text again. This is an ongoing process of trial and error repeated over and over until the reading sounds really smooth or at least a lot smoother than when you first started. This is a definite and results guaranteed method to get better reading results. It will also help you with pronunciation. Although this exercise focuses on just one piece of block text, it certainly isn? a waste of time. You?l find that by going through this process it will train your word identification skills and overall language assimilation so that it has a powerful effect over all of your future reading. You can imagine the power that this technique starts to produce when you apply it to several different reading texts over a period of say 4 to 6 weeks. The students that I have taken through this process have all showed amazing results and some of them have astonished their friends, family and co-workers with the speed and accuracy that they?e developed in such a relatively short time.

Once the student has established this powerful reading technique and is able to apply the results to reading other texts, then the student finds that their grammar will also automatically grow without any conscious effort because when a student does a lot of reading, it is also naturally absorbing good grammar from the texts being read because after all, it is always good grammar that holds any text together. Without the existence of grammar the text would cease to exist!
   
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