We've all heard that reading is good for vocabulary but what about reading as a way to improve your fluency? Let's look at a few things we can do that can lead to better speaking skills and more fluency in a foreign language - I've studied French as an adult and I have been studying Russian for three years!
1. Read out loud - (en veu alta, en voz alta, en voix haut)
1. Read out loud - (en veu alta, en voz alta, en voix haut)
Reading
out loud or extensive reading (for pleasure) is another great way to help you with your learning. Reading out loud (en voix haut, en voz alta, вслух) will help you consolidate word order, and sentence structure (where the different elements of the sentence go). You will also learn and consolidate vocabulary. Added value? learning about the author, or the subject or a book, etc!
Depending on your purpose but it's never a bad idea to choose simple texts of topics
which are of your interest and read them out loud. No challenging vocabulary, the
aim is to gain fluency (yes, fluency when speaking), no worries about vocabulary, this should be used just
as a way to consolidate structures, …it's best done with a teacher or a friend /partner to help you with pronunciation.
Disadvantage:
if done without a teacher (or someone to help) bad pronunciation habits won’t
be tackled (ie. No connected speech resulting in dropping final sounds of
words, “mis-sstressed” words, etc).
Nowadays, you can also record yourself on-line
on www.podomatic.com or https://www.speakpipe.com/ for example, very user-friendly podcast-recording websites. This can be exploited in a
number of ways too like the fact that you can keep your recordings on-line and
refer back to them whenever you like allowing you to compare it with later
recordings of the same text, for example.
Another "read out loud" thing you can do is to read out loud the exercises you've done in class, once you know the exercises are correct.
2. Google and other phonetic transcription software
type or paste sentence, or short text on a website with audio /play software and listen and copy. Record yourself reading sentences and see that the more times you say them, the easier it gets to ge your mouth and tongue to produce initially-strange-sounding syllables and words :-)
3. graded readers
Another "read out loud" thing you can do is to read out loud the exercises you've done in class, once you know the exercises are correct.
2. Google and other phonetic transcription software
type or paste sentence, or short text on a website with audio /play software and listen and copy. Record yourself reading sentences and see that the more times you say them, the easier it gets to ge your mouth and tongue to produce initially-strange-sounding syllables and words :-)
3. graded readers
Graded readers (these short,
abridged=simplified books) now come with a CD-rom. Great source of vocabulary,
great for consolidating structures and tenses, great for, though graded,
natural sounding expressions in dialogues…plus the pronunciation support
through the Cd-rom.
A means of exploiting the text is by
focusing on certain structures. Let’s look at potential areas of development:
- if you are doing verbs from your grammar book, try and identify
them in the text, classify its use (is it present continuous with future
reference, or is it a temporary action?, if it is future: will, going to
or present continuous, why did the author use “going to” instead of
“will”… ) Write your ideas down, on post its and when we have a tutorial
class, we can expand on that.
- Gerunds and infinitives. Want to do, start Ving, like Ving, force
me to, … what verbs need to and what verbs need -ing?
- Prepositions after verbs (and note that if a preposition is
followed by a verb, this needs to be in –ing.
- collocations: words which tend to appear with other certain words. (ejemplo en castellano:
matar el hambre o apagar la sed, verdad que nunca decimos apagar el
hambre?) This is a collocation.
- Verb tenses and their corresponding time references: “ago”always
goes with past simple, “now” goes with present simple and continuous,
“recently” tends to go with present perfect but not present simple, “for”
and “since” go with present perfect (in general)…
- phrasal verbs
- question formation. How are questions made?
- Countable and uncountable nouns and some/any, much/many,
few/little…
- comparisons, reported speech, conditionals, passives… (for level 3
–6)
- etc
Each level focuses on some structures.
Levels 1 and 2 are elementary ones, 3 is pre-intermediate, etc. So feel free to
use basic level books if you feel unconfident about certain basic structures.
Almost all students need to consolidate basic grammar! Please check out each
level in:-
Listening to the recordings of graded
readers. Modern ones come with a
CD and you can listen and read at the same time. Listen and read each chapter a
couple of times (or as many as necessary until you are fully familiar with how
words are pronounced (and connected with each other) - make a note of what you think you understand on your first listening, then, listen a second time and make more notes, then listen again with the text (listen and read at the same time). Then, check vocabulary and listen again without the text. Add any variations you like to this suggestion and find what's best for you and your objective.
Where to find them?
In Spain, you can easily borrow them from Public libraries, and EOIs too.
You can buy them second hand, or in bookshops and amazon. Just search for Graded Readers Penguin, Macmillan, Oxford, Longman, etc. the big names in EFL have their own
Watch this video to find out what this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnNf_z4LQ7A - a teacher I've just found and it's short and straight to the point. and google for others :-)
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