Becoming a better reader

How can I improve my English reading skills, especially when it comes to the academic reading in the TOEFL iBT?

Because there are so many different strategies I recommend, I’ll give my advice in two separate articles — the first dealing with general strategies and the second with skills needed for reading tests.

Vocabulary

I’ve already written a series of articles about vocabulary starting with this one. And in my opinion, when it comes to reading quickly for general comprehension (not what we call a close reading), knowledge of vocabulary is much more important than knowledge of grammar. From my own experience reading French for many years, I don’t pay much attention to grammatical structures as long as I get a basic sense of subject/verb/object, past/present/future, and basic parts of speech. But if I don’t know a word, it can make all the difference in whether I understand what a text is saying.

Vocabulary knowledge is also essential for doing well on the Reading section of the TOEFL, as I’ll describe in my next article. Thus, a fundamental part of improving reading fluency will focus on continually acquiring new vocabulary. Don’t stop! You will never ever know enough words.

Extensive Reading

One of the first things I ask my students is whether they enjoy reading in their native language.

Some people are “ born readers” and some aren’t. Although I think everyone can increase their love of reading, given the right reading material, I don’t think you can essentially change your attitude. If you do love to read, you’re in luck. As an English and American Literature major, I can tell you that some of the greatest works in world literature have been written in English. Being able to read them in their original language rather than a translation may be all the motivation you need to work hard on your reading skills.

But whether you love reading or not, reading should be essentially enjoyable. Nothing kills the pleasure like struggling to understand every other word. This is why teaching professionals advocate extensive reading.

Extensive reading happens when a reader pays attention to the meaning of the words, and not the words themselves. And studies have shown that for this to occur, readers need to be familiar with 95 to 99% of the words they encounter.

Think about that. You should know (in the sense that you have a good understanding of the meaning of a word; if “inner translation” is going on in your head, it’s rapid and almost unnoticeable) at least 95 out of every 100 words you read. Ideally, you would know 99 of them.

But here’s the problem. If you aren’t a very good reader, how do you find material that’s easy enough to read? In my classroom, my reading students used graded readers, which are written for adult learners of English and come in a range of reading levels based on vocabulary and sentence structure. You may be fortunate enough to have access to these kinds of readers through a public or university library or you may try to locate them online. Well-known publishers of graded readers include Cambridge, Oxford, Macmillan, Pearson, and Scholastic. This is a chart that gives some common series and their levels.  If you want to assess your current reading level, try this placement test. Another option, if you don’t have access to graded readers for adults, is to read chapter books written for English-speaking children. Although they may seem a bit babyish, these books are ideal for beginning and intermediate readers. I particularly like Cynthia Rylant’s series: Henry and Mudge (a boy and his dog) and Mr. Putter & Tabby (an elderly man and his cat).

A few recommendations made by the researchers Nation and Wang include:

• Read at least one graded reader each week.
• Read at least five readers at one level before advancing to the next level.
• Read at least 15 – 20 graded readers each year, and preferably 30.
• Read more books at the later levels than the earlier levels.

A resource you can use to evaluate online reading material is to copy and paste a sample of the text into a readability checker. Texts are assigned a grade level corresponding to grades in US schools (with 12^th being the highest). For comparison, my blog article Give or Get? is scored Grade 6 (fairly easy to read) while the TOEFL reading passage that I’m going to use in my next article is Grade 12 (fairly difficult to read).

Speed Reading

Reading quickly is not going to help you much with the TOEFL iBT Reading section (although it will help somewhat with the Speaking and Writing integrated tasks); we’ll talk about that in the next article. But if you need English for academic study or a career, you will want to avoid plodding along when you read. Being able to pick up your pace will make your life a lot easier!

To test your current reading speed, just Google “testing reading speed” and you’ll find lots of different sites. I tried this one at the Wall Street Journal and found my reading speed ranged from 432 – 492 words per minute, with 100% comprehension.

Obviously, your reading speed is going to be affected by the difficulty of the text (including vocabulary, structures, and content). A reasonable reading goal for easy reading material (known words, basic grammatical structures, simple content) is around 250 words per minute. And you need to read carefully enough that you’re able to understand and remember what you read … this is why tests of reading speed include comprehension questions at the end.

One of the best ways to improve reading speed is to use graded readers that are a much easier level for you. Here you focus not on meaning (which improves vocabulary and understanding) but on speed alone. Use a stopwatch to test your speed and don’t be afraid to repeat reading the same material over and over. Keep a log of your progress and make a game of the whole process.

Finally, a bit of advice from my own experience reading French. Even now, after 40 years of reading French, I find that with challenging texts (those written for French-speaking adults, including authors like Proust who challenge even French readers), I often activate my “inner translator.” In other words, every word I read in French gets mentally translated into English before it’s processed. I have to make a really conscious effort to avoid that to pick up my reading speed.

So, we’ve talked about reading a lot and reading quickly. In the next article, we’ll talk about reading closely and carefully, especially in the context of a specific TOEFL Reading passage.