Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Jincheng Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Changzhou Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Reading comprehension is critical for long term language acquisition. Reading exposes the students to a much richer source of sentences, vocabularies, grammar, and expressions than any classroom, movie or song. It feeds the students with the correct language structure. It is an essential skill that can sometimes be challenging and frustrating for the students, however, those students who make a habit of reading and paying close attention to the language structures in the text, learn the language much faster than their fellow students. Reading also helps the students link the language structure and grammar seen in the text to what they have already learned in class or their previous knowledge. Especially if the reading is a story or has a story, this linkage can help the long term memorization. Because reading stories or a real-world related article such as news is motivational and provokes interest that leads to effective reading comprehension. However, acquiring this skill has its own obstacles. The challenges that I have observed my students face when they start to learn the reading skill include, the difference in the punctuation rules between the L1 and L2, idioms and slangs or even phrasal verbs. These can often become the reason that a different meaning is conveyed from a text by different students, which can make them frustrated. Therefore, or at least to my experience, as much as the students' first language is closer to the language they are learning as a second language, learning all skills would be less challenging but especially the reading and comprehension skill. But, as it is true for gaining every skill, practice makes perfect. The more reading practice students do the easier picking up the skill will be. One of the most important benefits of using reading in language acquisition is that in a reading text all parts of the language are available. One can observe which grammar structure is used where and how, as well as how expressions are being employed and in which situation can we use them. Also, the language forms are there and one can learn how they can possibly be used in a text. Also, the formal and informal way of writing can be learned from reading practice. The choice of verbs in a formal or informal text, the use of expressions and how to phrase a request or question, are all examples of information one can extract from reading practice. The students can see the new vocabularies embedded in various grammatical structures, just like the examples in a dictionary but not all students study those examples. I always direct my students' attention to all the information they can absorb from reading and ask them to pay close attention to the details. It might take a long time to read a short text this way but so much data can be extracted and learned, which makes later experiences smoother, easier and faster. Also, over time it makes the comprehension of the text more accurate which plays a great role in learning a new language. If the reading practices and skill acquisition is done correctly and persuasively, the students can use the knowledge they gained in all the other skills. They can be used in writing, speaking or even in listening. If a person's language acquisition is limited to spoken forms, it might result in somewhat simplified language skills whereas reading can enhance language acquisition in a great deal.
