A Good Read Could Save Your English (Amen!)

Kindle Fire

If you seriously think about it, learning a language isn’t as hard as it’s cracked up to be. At the end of the day, it’s all part of a process in which first you absorb a lot of structures (listening and understanding) and then, after you’ve heard them plenty of times and feel confident enough, reproduce them as best as you can. Once you are there, it’s just a matter of perfecting this in-and-out flow or closed circuit.

We –especially us, teachers– make things harder because we’ve come to equate the teaching of grammar rules to the learning of the language itself. And that’s far from true. Knowing grammar may be useful as a self-correction device, and what it does for sure is to make you proficient in grammar tests (which is what we actually prepare students for in Secondary Education, not for the speech act itself). As I said, what we’re dealing here is with a simple enough two-way process, in which you need to understand what is being said in order to interact with others.

Of course, it takes time. Kids take a few years before mastering their mother tongue, but everyone –even the slowest child– ends up learning it. So it’s not a matter of intelligence, but of practice. And three one-hour lessons per week in a crowded classroom aren’t really enough, so you’ll have to do better and create some kind of a private corner in your life devoted only to English.

We’ve given a few clues so far on how to get started (see previous posts). Today, though, we’d like to present you with an old but still revolutionary method whose practice will make you learn more in a single year than all your Secondary years put together (sue me if I’m lying!): Reading. Yes, you heard right.

And why not combine it with audio files, making the experience as close as possible to the real thing thanks to our great ally, the Internet. If you’re able to find the right read, that may very well be your quickest and safest ticket into English.

There are two things to consider here. First, your level, and then your likings.

Research has demonstrated that, in order for benefits to occur, the reader must already understand the majority of vocabulary on a page. For beginning and intermediate level students, this means relatively simple language such as that found in children's and young adult literature. Unless a reader has control of at least 95% of words on a page, it is unlikely that he or she will be able to use context to guess the meaning of unknown words.

As for the second aspect, why not go for the things you love. By doing a bit of soul-searching you can save yourself a lot of trouble and disappointments. What is it that you like best? Is it DIY (Do It Yourself, like when you assemble furniture from IKEA), tennis, films? Or is it just plain detective stories and romance? The moral about reading is simple: read about the sort of things you like, or about the things you would like to do or take up as a hobby.

Once you’ve picked the right read, check on Google (or wherever) to see whether there are e-books and audiobooks for that title. If you manage to get hold of both, the PDF (or e-book) and the audiobook, you’ll be able to read and listen at the same time. You’ll only have to stop every once in a while to check for unknown words (although I believe that most e-book readers –such as Kindle, FnacBook, or the different Sony and Samsung models– include a dictionary, accessible by just clicking the word).

Here are some simple and inexpensive web-sites containing children’s and young-adult literature in English:

1) Magic Keys: The Magic Keys web-site (http://www.magickeys.com/books) contains more than thirty illustrated stories at a wide range of difficulty levels. At the beginning reader level, a good example is Rolando Merino’s illustrated and animated Alphabet book (http://www.magickeys.com/books/alphabet/index.html). For low intermediate level readers an interesting example is Valerie Hardin's Grow Your Own Gargoyle (http://www.magickeys.com/books/gargoyle/index.html) story about a girl ordering strange things from comic book advertisements. High intermediate readers might try Carol Moore's science fiction story Second Thoughts (http://www.magickeys.com/books/alien/index.html).

2) ByGosh: Classic illustrated short stories, poems and short novels can be found at the Bygosh web-site (http://www.bygosh.com/index.html). There are more than 100 selections ranging from short, simple folktales like The Fox and the Crow (http://www.bygosh.com/Features/092000/foxandcrow.html) written at the low intermediate level to Jack London’s classic young adult novel Call of the Wild (http://www.bygosh.com/cotw/index.htm) written at the high intermediate level to several classic adult novels written at still higher levels. Though many of the readings will be too difficult for beginning and intermediate readers, the variety of free materials available from this site is impressive.

3) Children’s Digital Library: For the widest selection of materials in English, a useful site is the Children's Digital Library (http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/SearchWorld). This site has illustrated children’s books in many languages and more than 1000 illustrated children’s books in English. Books on the site can be searched by continent, length, topic, reader age and several other useful descriptors. One of the more useful features of this site is the extensive search capacity. Though it doesn't categorize books by language difficulty level, it does categorize them by age. Books in the 3-5 age category tend to be aimed at beginning readers and deal with the English alphabet and very simple vocabulary. Books in the 6-10 age category are also mainly aimed at children, but there are still some titles that are both useful and acceptable for adolescent and adult English learners. For example, Dorothy Whitfield's Carib Breeze (http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/SimpleSearchCategory?ids=&langid=&pnum=1&cnum=1&text=Carib&lang=English&search=Search) is a collection of poetry with subject matter appropriate for both children and adults. The stanza, below, from "The Wind and I" is a wonderful example of straight-forward poetic language accessible to low intermediate level adults and adolescents.

I have been talking with the wind
The flying wind,
The crying wind.
He told of fishermen far from home
On treacherous seas that sigh and moan.
Of a lone bird’s call in the empty air
Of darkening waves—of chilling fear—
The flying wind
The crying wind
I have been talking to the wind. (p. 5)

4) Tumblebooks: The most technologically sophisticated site described in this post is Tumblebooks (http://www.tumblebooks.com/ ). This is a subscription service with access to more than 100 children's books ranging from the beginning to intermediate range of difficulty. Books are labelled with both age and difficulty level ratings. In the "Storybook" section of the web-site, one can find several dozen widely recognized titles in children’s literature like Robert Munsch's Paper Bag Princess (http://www.tumblebooks.com/library/asp/full_book.asp?ProductID=85 )and Darlene Cronin’s humorous Diary of a Worm (http://www.tumblebooks.com/library/asp/full_book.asp?ProductID=2253). These online stories take the illustrations of the books and animate the action. The stories are read orally while visually highlighting phrases and vocabulary words being read. This provides both a guide to pronunciation and a sense of the rhythm of the English language. Clicking on a particular word or phrase can repeat the pronunciation.

The Tumblebooks site also has more difficult material in the section labelled "Tumble Readables". Here one can find more difficult young adult novels that can be read online without the illustrations or audio support. Though these are less current than the children’s picture books in the "Storybook" section, Tumblebooks does present in a very readable format popular classics like Barrie’s Peter Pan and Kipling's Junglebook. It is possible to get a free 30-day trail subscription from Tumblebooks.

5) City College of San Francisco: If you prefer to do things on your own (such as choosing your own title and audio support for it), you may want to try this site (http://www.ccsf.edu/Library/instruct/eslintermed.pdf). There you’ll find a never-ending list with novels for intermediate level EFL/ESL students. Just take your pick and set off on this reading adventure!

Otherwise, ask almighty Google. He’s so much knowledgeable than me.

Sources:

- The Internet TESL Journal

- Library and Learning Resources, City College of San Francisco