Reading Power
Hi, this is AJ. Time for the next lesson. Now this is one of my favorite topics by one of my favorite people so I want you to be extra happy, extra strong body and physiology for this one. So stand up straight. Get those shoulders back. Chest up. Breathe deep. Get that air going in there. Energize your body. Big, big, super big smile, huge smile. Make everyone think you’re super crazy. Now move your body. Come on, get it moving now. If you’re standing you just kind of wiggle around. Move those arms, move those legs. If you can, start walking. Get the blood going. Get that energy going. Let’s go! Are you ready?
This lesson is called “The Power of Reading” and it comes from an article by Dr. Stephen Krashen. He’s one of my favorite people in the world. Dr. Stephen Krashen is probably the number one expert on language learning and language teaching in the world. He is just an incredible professor, an incredible researcher, an incredible intellectual. He has done an incredible amount of research on the topic of learning languages. And today we’re going to talk about just one part of his research. Really, Effortless English is based a lot on Dr. Stephen Krashen’s research, all of the methods we use. But we’re going to talk about just one particular method, one particular idea, very strong idea that comes from Dr. Stephen Krashen and his research and that is the power of reading. Specifically it’s the power of pleasure reading. It’s the power of easy reading. We’ll talk about that more in a minute.
But first let me read a little bit from this article. Now this article, as you might guess, is about the power of reading. And Dr. Krashen did a lot of research about reading. Specifically about how do people, native speakers, and people learning foreign languages, how do they learn vocabulary? How do they get good grammar? How do they get excellent writing skills? One of the most important methods is reading. Reading for pleasure. Now when we talk about reading there are kind of two different ways to learn reading, even for small children, learning a native language. Now one method, the old method, is that you learn reading skills. So you have to study and analyze vocabulary, for example.
Spelling in English is very difficult and tough so we have to study that a lot in school. Well, we don’t have to but often with old methods and old teachers we do. We study, study, study spelling. We study, study, study vocabulary. And we learn all these skills. We use all these textbooks to learn reading. And, of course, people learning new language, a foreign language, well guess what. You do the same things, right? You learn textbooks. You’re reading all these textbooks and you’re trying to learn all these “reading skills.”
Now the other way, the other method, and this is the method, in fact that works much, much better according to Dr. Krashen’s research, according to a lot of other research. It’s just reading for fun, imagine that! And what that means is reading a lot of easy books. Now for children that might be comic books. It might be just children’s novels. And it’s just reading, reading, reading, in other words we learn to read by reading. We learn vocabulary from reading. We learn a lot of our grammar from reading. We learn our writing skills from reading. Not by analyzing and studying grammar. Not be trying to memorize vocabulary. If you read something very easy, you know most of the words. And then you find a new word, you don’t need to memorize it. You will start to understand that word just because you understand the general meaning of the story. You understand the whole paragraph. You understand the sentence.
So that one word you can guess the meaning. And then guess what happens? You see that new word again somewhere else in the book. And then you start, it’s in a different situation. A little bit different paragraph, a little bit different sentence, and now you’re “Ah” you understand it a little more. Then you see it again in another paragraph, somewhere else in the book. And over time you will naturally learn that word. You’ll never try to memorize it. You will never study it but you will learn it. You will know it forever. That’s the best way to learn vocabulary. There’s a lot of research about this. They compare people who try to memorize vocabulary with books, textbooks, that is. And then other people who learn just by reading easy books all the time. They’re reading novels all the time. They’re reading, reading, reading.
Which group of people learns more vocabulary faster? The readers, the people who are just reading for fun. They’re just reading a lot of fun, easy novels and books. Those people have much bigger vocabularies than people who are actually trying to study vocabulary. It’s the same for grammar. People who are studying grammar, study, study grammar rules, study grammar textbooks. And then other people who are just reading lots of novels. They’re reading, reading, reading all the time. Comic books, novels, articles, stories, the readers have better grammar than the people who are studying grammar from textbooks. It’s a huge difference. And the more you read over time, the bigger the difference. The better your grammar gets compared to people who are using textbooks. So this is a huge topic. It is so important.
So let me read a little bit from Dr. Krashen and then we’ll talk a little more. Okay, this is from Dr. Krashen:
“When second language learners read for pleasure, they develop
the competence they need to move from the beginning ordinary
conversational level to a level where they can use the second
language for more demanding purposes. Such as the serious
study of literature, business and so on. When they read for
pleasure they can continue to improve in their second language
without classes, without teachers, without study. And even without
people to converse with.
When we read we really have no choice. We must develop literacy.
We rarely find well‑read people who have serious problems with
grammar, spelling and so on. They write acceptably well because
they can’t help it. They have subconsciously acquired good writing
style as well as the conventions of writing. Our problem in
language education, as Frank Smith has pointed out, is that we
have confused cause and effect. We have assumed that we first
learn language skills and then apply these skills to reading and
writing. But that is not the way the human brain works. Rather,
reading for meaning, reading about things that matter to us is the
cause of language development.”