Reading, Reading, and Reading..

Happy New Year! Well, my break was awesome and quite hectic as there were so many things to do. However, if we enjoy and love what we do, there will be a lot of happiness that we can get.

What can say about reading? Well, Bond et al. (1979) state that since our world is a reading world, it would be difficult to find any activity, whether in school, in the home, on the form of business, which does not require at least some reading ability. Often reading is an indispensable channel of communication with an ever-widening world. They also add that even a casual observation of people’s activities shows the important role of reading in their lives. By that it means, more people read today than ever before. People get a lot of benefits from doing this kind of activity. In general, people read to obtain information, to buy economically, to arrive at a decision, to provide pleasure, and for many other reasons.

While in more educational context, Brown (2003) states that reading is a skill that teachers simply expect learners to acquire. He adds that reading is the most essential skill for success in all educational contexts which remains a skill of paramount importance as we create assessments of general language ability. Moreover, most of scientific books and academic texts are written in English (Levine et al., 2000). In English as a Foreign Language, the emphasis of teaching and learning process tends to be on reading skills. Therefore, students need to learn reading skills in order to understand a lot of academic information provided at their school or some non-academic information in their surroundings such as magazines, newspaper, books, directories, pamphlets, catalogues, television, and internet.

One day, my friend from Poland said that the effective way to learn English is by reading a lot. It can improve the vocabulary size of everyone who does read.

Yeah, I agree, but not totally agree. As we know that English skills are always integrated each other. One cannot stand by itself, it needs the other skills to produce what is called “communication”.

Extensive Reading (ER) is not really useful if the learners do not know how to pronounce the words. It will be difficult for them to speak and be understood by other people if the pronunciation is wrong. Moreover, it will be difficult for them to understand what people say although they actually know the words.

I have a friend who teaches Japanese language. She teaches vocabulary at most. She writes a lot of words on the white board and then, in addition to tell the meaning of each word, she also asks the learners to repeat after her.

When I was a student, my English teacher often asked me and my friends to read aloud some English texts. Then, she also read again the text by herself so we knew the wrong pronunciation that we had just did. After that, we discussed the context of the text.

I think both examples are good, so sometimes I imitate and apply them at school. In the future, I have a plan to make ER as an additional task. So, the students who do and make report of what they read will get stars or some rewards. Cheers.