How to improve the ability of English reading

alvinwoolf

　　Some people think that reading is a verysimple matter. You move your eyes along the line, and the author's message appears somehow in your mind. When a person is highly skilled as a reader, it does seem that something like that takes place. However, the actual reading process is quite complicated. Try to think back when you were first learning to read, or observe a young child learning to read. It is a very difficult, complex, sometimes, painful process.

　　Reduced to its simplest elements, we might say that comprehension is a part of the communication process of getting the thoughts that were in the author's mind into the reader's, but how does one reader can get the idea clearly? It depends on the reading ability of the reader's. How can the readers make improvements in reading? There are many skills to improve one's ability of reading comprehension.

　　One of the most important skills in reading is the knowledge of word .The number of the words you know determines the difficulty and complexity of the material you can read and understand. If you have an extremely limited reading vocabulary, you will be able to read only very simple material. Obviously, vocabulary forms a stumbling block for the poor reader. The more words you memorize, the faster you read the article. So, it is necessary to memorize words as much as you can. By the way, it should be realized that approximately half of all written English material is composed of the 300 commonest words. Certain words then have a very high occurrence and are used over and over again. Since the English vocabulary is so vast, you cannot hope to master vocabulary only by learning your lessons in the classroom. Reading of course involves much more than simply knowing the dictionary meaning of individual words. When coping with unknown vocabulary. You have to develop strategies, which will allow you either to discover the meaning of the words or at least to proceed further with the text in spite of not knowing the meanings of some new words. One of the efficient ways is guessing the unknown vocabulary. Guessing the meaning of words is a shortcut in reading. While reading in our own language, we usually have an unconscious habit of making logical inference as to the meaning of words based on the context. You can use the context to get the meaning and to help you develop the comprehension skills. To be a good reader, deducing the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items through contextual lines is necessary.

　　In order to improve reading ability. It's essential to memorize words and master the ways of guessing the meaning of words, besides, when reading, you should catch the phrases as a unit of meaning and view the sentences as a unit of meaning. Sentences are the basic building blocks for writing something that will be read. A sentence, as a larger unit of meaning, is always about something--its subject--and always has a statement about the subject. The form of a sentence may be vary, but the subject and the statement about it are always there. The idea conveyed by a sentence will always come to you as a whole. So being familiar with various sentence patterns and being able to have a good sense of what is conveyed by a sentence, even a very long one with some clauses inside, will be helpful for a more mature and efficient reading. So do the paragraph and passage. But the paragraph and passage are more complex than the sentence. A paragraph has sentences that are connected with each other in some logical ways and a passage is the connection of the paragraphs.

　　Having known the parts of the passage, we will search the meaning of the paragraph. Generally speaking, if one passage is complex in structure, it involves much information such as culture, social background climate or tradition and customs, and perhaps you are puzzled at what on earth the author says. But you can be sure that there is only one main idea from the passage. How well you can comprehend the passage depends on whether you can get the main idea. Skilled authors usually try to organize their material around a particular point or \"main idea\". If you are good at reading comprehension, then you will be very sensible to it and this may help you to read with a high degree of efficiency and obtain maximum information from what you read with minimum misunderstanding. In reading we should be aware it is not always necessary to look for specific details. Every time you read a letter to the editor of a newspaper, a magazine article or a reference material. You must understand the main idea before you proceed. In much modern writing, the main idea is sometimes not as clear as it might be and it takes skills and practice to recognize it. When you are reading a paragraph or a passage for the main idea, it is a good idea to try to force yourself to read a little faster then usual. In this way you will be able to focus your attention on ideas and the relationships between them. There are, however, two common mistakes in identifying the main idea of a reading passage. One is to pick out a small part of the topic and assume it is the main idea; A main idea identified in this way is therefore too specific. The other common mistake is to state a main idea that is too general and covers more than the author intended. Both of the two mistakes should be devoid. In order to search for the main idea, it is very important to distinguish the topic sentences. The main idea of a paragraph is often expressed by a topic sentence. To put it in another way, a topic sentence usually best expresses the main idea that the author is trying to get across. Most paragraphs have a topic sentence. The remaining sentences either expand or support that central idea. There is no doubt that being able to identify the topic sentences quickly will help you to grasp the main idea of paragraph. It and 90% of all expository paragraphs in?has been estimated that between 60 English has the topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph. So it is a good idea for you to pay special attention to the first sentence of a paragraph, it is most likely to give you a main idea. Sometimes, however, the first sentence in a paragraph does not have the feel of a \"main idea\" sentence. It does not seem to give enough new information to justify a paragraph. In that case the most likely place to look for the topic sentence is the last sentence of the paragraph. There are also occasions when the topic sentence appears in the middle, or both at the beginning and at the end of a paragraph if an author does want to emphasize an important point. The opening and closing paragraph in a passage or chapter are also particular important. The opening paragraph suggests the general direction and content of the piece, while the closing paragraph often summarize the very essence of what has been said. Searching for the main idea of the paragraph is often called extensive reading. When we take this kind of reading skill, it is enough to get the general idea, and we needn't note all the details. Contrast with this skill, another reading skill is named intensive reading. Very often after you have read a text for the first time. You then return to it to perform more detailed comprehension exercises, which focus on details of the text. It is true that almost in all writing authors use details to express and defend the point they are trying to make. So to read more effectively, we must be able to recognize and remember the important details of a passage when necessary. A detail is a piece of information or fact in a paragraph or a passage which either proves, defines, or provides an example of the main idea of the reading material. Some facts are the whole sentences, while others may be the brief phrases. One way of deciding if something is a detail is by asking yourself: Is this a fact that could tell someone? Which is more effective, extensive reading or intensive reading? We can not simply give \"Yes\" or \"No\". It depends on the concrete occasions. We take different reading skill in different occasions.

　　Make inferences while reading is another means to improve reading ability. If the idea in a piece of reading is expressed in very explicit terms, it will be relatively easier for readers to read. But unfortunately it is not always the case. Sometimes writers prefer to write in a more subtle and implicit way, which calls for more careful reading and thinking. In order to have a good comprehension of such reading pieces, we should be trained to be able to read between the lines, that is, to be able to find out what is not explicitly stated by the writer.

　　Finally, trying to make progress in speed is an efficient way to improve reading ability. If you were a native reader of average ability, you could probably read at the rate of 250 words a minute. This reading speed might be already twice as fast as the speaking or listening. Hence, reading can be one of the fastest ways of putting verbal knowledge into your mind. The flexibility and inexpensiveness of printing also make verbal information by far the cheapest means of transmitting this kind of information. Fast reading, once it is mastered, makes reading more interesting, not more work. Fast reading doesn't comprehend so little as some slow eader would like to believe. This should be obvious from an examination of any sentence. Whenever you read something, where does the meaning lie? Is it in the individual words or in the sentence as a whole? Many individual words have almost no meaning by themselves. They must be seen in the context of a whole sentence in order to make sense. Good reader sees words as part of a whole sentence or paragraph；not just in isolation. This is why slow word-by-word readers often understand for less, or miss of the joy and excitement of reading.

　　Such are the skills in the reading. You should pay attention. In a word, reading involves much knowledge and common sense. And everybody has a kind of special reading skills of him .It is necessary to generalize the skills in the process of reading, and then we can improve our reading ability quickly.

　　Reference books:
　　1. David Nunan, Language Teaching Methodology P.70 Lexican relationship
　　2. David Nunan, A Discourse Perspective Language Teaching Methodology.P.67 Reading: A Discourse Perspective.

FROM：http://blog.zjhnedu.com/user/930/archives/2006/5120.html