Reading exercises
What exercises can you do?
For help with all these things, contact Charlie Martineau, the
Language Support Tutor - send me an email languagesupport@yorksj.ac.uk.
To get better at finding out quickly what an article is
about
- Read the title. Look at any pictures, diagrams and their
captions (the words underneath). Read the first and last
paragraph. If necessary, check key words in your
dictionary.
To get better at finding out quickly what the main topics of
the article are
- Read the title. Look at any pictures, diagrams and their
captions (the words underneath). Read the first and last
paragraph. If necessary, check key words in your
dictionary.
- Then read the first sentence of each paragraph. Often
this contains the paragraph's main idea. Then read
more quickly through the rest of the paragraph to see if it is
true in this case.
To get better at making notes on an article
- Find the main point of each paragraph. Highlight it with
a pen or pencil.
- If you want to mark details, use a different colour.
- When you have finished, you can easily see all the main points
in the article. This helps you understand it well.
To get better at guessing the meaning of words
As always, practice. But how?
- Choose the most common unknown words. These are the most
important ones. If a word appears 25 times in one article,
you know it's important!
- Look at the word and the sentence. Is the word a noun,
verb, adverb?
- Look at the meaning of the whole sentence. What meaning
is logical for the words you don't know?
- Do the same with other sentences which contain the same
word.
- If this is very difficult for you, use easier material.
It's very hard to improve your reading skills with difficult texts
- so use easier ones, for example graded readers. Information about graded readers can be
found here.
To get better at deciding what to read
- Ask your tutor for advice
- Ask the library staff for help.
To get better at using a library
Written by Charlie Martineau