5 tips to master your reading skill for English: Understanding verbs, idioms, learning grammar and making the connection between ideas and phrases in learning.
I think the fate of current generation is to study English more than anything else. As English is also a language, you need to study English conversation, English reading comprehension, English writing, etc., in various ways so that you can use English properly when you need it.
In this posting, we will talk about English reading among various types of learning English. Do you have any image that comes to mind when you think of “English Reading”? First of all, I remember the time when I read English texts and read English to study for the CSAT in high school. After that, I prepare English certificates such as TOEIC to prepare for employment, and I study English personally. But among all, I continued to read text in English. Then, what kind of study methods do you practice reading English?
For you who have not practiced English reading yet and are looking for tips on English reading, we have prepared 6 tips on English reading! If you already know and practice various English reading tips before, wait a minute! Please check with us in case you miss any tips.
1. Memorize English words and vocabulary as a phrase.
If I had to pick the most important foundation of all languages, it would be vocabulary. No matter how much grammar you know, if you don’t know the words, you can’t learn the right content in the end. As such, memorizing vocabulary, the basis of all languages, is the first step for reading English text. Words are always helpful as much as you know them. But that doesn’t mean you can just memorize all the words in the world. There are words that you don’t even know in your native tongue. Then how can I select vocabulary to learn efficiently? Depending on the purpose of studying, the words you have to memorize change little by little. I’ll let you know through some examples.
First, what should I do if I have to memorize words with the goal of a certain test, such as TOEIC or SAT?
If you are preparing for the test, there is a word that often appears in the test, so it is most efficient to memorize it by purchasing a vocabulary book that contains words from the test, such as “English words, TOEIC vocabulary, etc.”
If you memorize the vocabulary from beginning to end, everything is okay. But it’s not as easy as it sounds, is it? I’m sure there are a lot of people who are already tired of memorizing vocabulary. If you have a vocabulary book that starts with the alphabet, you’ll have at least once left the A part of the alphabet in tatters, deep inside the bookcase. What should these people do? I have no choice but to solve the test questions to prepare for the test.
Even if you don’t know many words, first try to finish answering the questions in the mock test. After finish answering, mark the words that you don’t know and memorize them. What if there are too many words you don’t know? Memorize the most important words first. If you don’t know which word is important, don’t worry! The more question you’ve answered, the more important words come out repeatedly in the questions. If you memorize words within the questions themselves, you will be able to memorize words without having to actually memorize them since you saw those words again and again.
Second, what should I do if I have to read English for increasing my own skill, not for getting a good grade in the test?
Please choose the learning materials you prefer first, such as articles, books, dramas, movies, and music, and learn the vocabulary from your favorite materials one by one. Also, you can select the learning materials based on your interest too; if you want to know any industry words, memorize each of the words by reading industrial articles or contents. If you memorize one or two words like this, you will learn many words more naturally.
If you memorized words in many ways to accomplish your goal, there’s something else you might find helpful! It’s an idiom. There are people who think, “You just need to memorize words. Why do you have to memorize idioms?” I brought some idioms for those people. Have you heard these phrases before: ‘walk on eggshells’ and ‘to drive bananas?’ If you know the meaning of the idioms, you can answer it right away, but if you don’t, it would be roughly interpreted in the other way. I can picture the expressions of you who are wearing their heads while saying, “What does this mean?!!” The answer is ‘look around’ and ‘make someone crazy’. There are idioms that you can’t infer by just knowing the single words in it. I hope you memorize idioms so that you don’t get this kind of nonsense.
2. Learn grammar!
If you memorized words and idioms, you should now know grammar. If you don’t learn grammar properly, the subject changes and the meaning goes off the topic while reading a text. To prevent this from happening, you have to learn from easy grammar to difficult grammar step by step. When I first started studying grammar, I was like, “This is doable!” and I had fun studying it, but when it was a little difficult, I thought, “Ah…” You might also think, “Should I give up?” If you don’t master grammar properly, you won’t be able to learn any language steadily. So please don’t give up in the middle and continue your grammar studies! Grammar study can be done by purchasing English grammar books step by step, and you can learn them through the teacher in the same way as in-class or academy classes, so find a way that is suitable for you!
3. Analyze the sentence structure by breaking and reading!
If you have prepared English for the CSAT in Korea, you must have learned it at school. Do you all remember? Finally, it’s time to use the skills we learned ~ If you have to read English not only through the English you learned at school, but also through steady English learning, you have to cut and analyze the sentence structure one by one. So how do you break down sentence and analyze the sentence structure? Actually, it’s too long to put in this post, so I can’t explain it in depth, but I’ll introduce it briefly, so don’t miss it and follow along!
The big frame to analyze sentence is to find the subject, verb, and object. Is it hard to find the subject, verb, and object? Don’t worry! Let’s start with a really simple sentence like, “I love you”. The subject here is I, the verb is love, and the object is you. What do you think? Analyzing the sentences with simple sentences is not difficult, right?
If you have found a subject, verb, or object, write down what position each word is in, and now make a cut mark in the middle. You might think, “is it necessary to cut off such a simple sentence?” The reason why I train with simple sentences at first is to analyze sentences without panicking when I encounter long sentences in the future. If you practice constantly analyzing the sentence structure, you will have the ability to analyze sentences even if you need to analyze long sentences gradually at the end.
4. Read out loud!
When you finish memorizing vocabulary and analyzing sentence structure, now is the time to read out loud the English text. When you read a text aloud, you need to know all the right pronunciation for vocabulary. That means, reading aloud method is a great way to check out whether you know the words or understand the sentence or not. Also, when you want to master a language, your skill needs to be developed as a whole with listening, reading, writing and speaking. You need to make sure that when you want to learn a word, you should know the meaning, the pronunciation, and the spelling. If you lost any of these, you can’t say that you’ve learned the word. And reading out loud is the best way to test what you’ve learned. When you read a text out loud, you can figure out a new meaning behind the words or you can understand the story easier than simply reading the text without speaking out loud.
5. Try to use your background knowledge as many as possible!
What would you do when you face a topic in a professional field such as science or arts? Don’t be afraid and try to utilize your common sense and basic knowledge. The text itself will naturally deliver a message that you might already know. Even though the reading text is composed of difficult professional vocabulary that you’ve might not fully understand, the message itself will be something like “the sun rises from the east”, or “the Eiffel tower is in Paris”. In some cases, the message can be really simply as it is. So, if you find difficulty especially during a reading part in a test, you should focus on simple things and trust your background knowledge.
For today, I’ve explained 5 tips to master your reading skill for English. It might be simple for someone, but I hope this was helpful for whom feel stuck in their learning journey. Please keep these tips in your mind so that your reading ability will be increased eventually. If you want to try to import these tips right away in your study, you can try out with AmazingTalker, an online tutoring platform!
