ACTIVITIES TO IMPROVE YOUR READING

• Open your eyes- Try to boost your awareness of the reading you do all around you. Pay attention to English on billboards, advertisements, leaflets, food packages, etc.
• Identify your reading problems by writing a summary- Find a short newspaper article which interests you and read it once quickly to get the main ideas. Then cover it up and try to write a brief summary of the main points. Finally, compare the summary with the article to see how many main points you have got. If you find the result unsatisfactory, try to identify your problem. Do you have problems with sentence structures, vocabulary, etc ? If you can identify your reading problem, focus on it.
• Time your reading- Look for the main ideas of an article for a limited time. Don’t bother about the details. This is a method to enhance your speed of reading. Keep a log of the amount of time it takes. If the time decreases, then you should be getting more information more quickly.
• Make cloze exercises- Make a cloze exercise, either for yourself or a friend. Photocopy the text and use correction fluid to white out some words. You can focus on any aspect of language you wish, for example, nouns, verbs, prepositions, or whatever you find difficult. Fill in the blanks. Check your answer with the original texts. Think about the words you used and the words in the original text. This method can enhance your awareness of using different terms in different contexts.
• Read the Chinese version in advance- Read texts in Chinese first before you read the English texts. After getting the main ideas from Chinese materials, reading the English ones becomes easier. You will realise how some Chinese expressions are expressed in English.
• Follow the instructions for various reading materials- Try to follow the instructions of manuals or guidebooks for any electrical appliance, e.g. computer, mini hi-fi, recording machines. Does the machine perform the function you wish? If not, try to decide what went wrong in your reading. Alternatively, you can read a cook book and test your comprehension by preparing the food correctly.
• Guess meaning from context - While reading, people are usually discouraged by unfamiliar words or phrases. An inefficient reader looks up every unknown word/phrase in a dictionary but an efficient one doesn’t. Why ? Because the efficient reader guesses meaning from the context of the text. When you come across new words from an article, don’t check the dictionary immediately! Try to guess the meaning of the words first. A more interesting way of doing this is to try to get one or two friends to read the same article. If there are any common unknown words/phrases, compete with your friends to guess the correct meaning. Look the words/phrases up in the dictionary for the correct definition. The one who gets the closest meaning wins.
• Keep a resource bank of similar reading items- You can divide items into several categories such as finance, education, accidents, fashion or housing. Add new articles according to these categories. Arrange them nicely in a book. Frequently read the materials and you will develop a large vocabulary on a particular item. Alternatively, you can find some listening materials, videos and television programmes, on the same or similar topics and compare them with the written topics. Your knowledge of words/phrases/grammatical structures will consolidate if you can see the same language several times in different contexts.
  Read for pleasure- Research has shown that reading consistently for pleasure boosts comprehension and vocabulary. Try popular books, comics, books about the films you have seen. It is NOT necessary to understand every word, just keep reading.
• Read with a grammar focus- Look at a reading passage and see how the grammatical structures are used. Try to classify them under different headings like relative clauses, present tense, passive voice etc. Being able to identify different grammatical structures of a passage boosts your reading speed. If you have trouble classifying the grammatical structures, you may have to consult a grammar book or teacher.
• Create your own comprehension questions- Often you have a lot of materials to read but you do not have a specific task to test your understanding. If this is the case, write your own comprehension questions to an article to test a friend. You and your friend can take turns preparing comprehension questions for other articles. Don’t forget that you have to prepare the answers before you test each other.