"Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose." This is a quote from the cover of "Reading Like A Writer", by Francine Prose.
Although the book is purported to teach native English speaker how to improve their writing skill by reading, the principle also applies nicely onto Chinese English learners.
Learning English writing by reading is commonly understood and practiced by many Chinese. Some of the university students that I know do read a lot of books. Usually, they skim the books pretty fast; each time encountering a word that they don't yet know, they look up an electronic dictionary and then keep going. They told me by doing so, they can learn many new vocabulary for their writing.
Dear readers, do you see the problem? The problem is that when they are reading, they simply read and practically do nothing else(looking up the dictionary like that doesn't really count, I will show that to you soon).
And that is wrong, and is wrong!
The first wrong is dedicated to the problem of reading speed. Oftentimes, people judge the reading speed on an absurd scale that the faster the better. Well, the only positive comment I can make is that those people can't really get much worse in terms of their judgment already .
In fact, reading speed should vary according to the purpose of reading. For example, if you are reading newspaper to simply inform yourself, you read relatively fast; on the other hand, if you want to study a specific aspect of an article, you sip it slowly.
Skimming books, in my opinion, is one of the worst deed you can do in terms of learning English. What you should do, instead, is reading slowly. Sounds easy right? Actually it is so.
Generally, you should read English books word by word, even if you fully understand vocabulary and context. By doing so, you would have a much, much stronger impression of the book that you are reading. And having a strong impression of the books is one of the keys to practically using the learned knowledge in your writings.
Many people, when they meet some hard passage in the books, they just check the new words that they don't know and then sort-of skip the part without really understand it. To me, that is absolutely pointless. First, you do not fully get the meanings of the new vocabulary since you don't even know in what context they are used; secondly, you cannot possibly say you know the "story", if you can't even grasp fractions of context here and there in the book.
Then, what should you do instead? Read even slower. For a few "hot spots" that you have particular difficulty to comprehend, you should re-read it for a couple of times, and probably go back few lines to read the preceding part. If even that doesn't work out, you should try to ask someone who is more knowledgeable in English to explain it to you.
Now, I would like to use the second "wrong" to elaborate how to use dictionary. Indeed, checking dictionary is a great way to learn English. Especially with the ease brought by the electronic technology, it has become a necessity to Chinese English Learners. Nonetheless, the seemingly easy act of looking up definitions in dictionary actually requires some skills.:
1)Whenever you check a word in dictionary, make sure you peruse all the definitions written;
2)if there are exemplary sentences included in the definition, all the better! Read it up!
3)last and most importantly, write down the new word that you have just checked on your notebook or a text file on your computer, and make sure you go back to review them in time.
All in all, reading effectively and efficiently isn't something that we can acquire in days, but if you would follow my humble advices, plus some of your own ingeniousness, you will eventually achieve such reading style--or a better one--one day. |
