Good reader = Good learner

We are university students who have created this blog in order to provide some advice about how to improve your reading skill. Reading can be sometimes boring and difficult, specially if you are a beginner. However, through some strategies and practice, reading can be as easy and entertaining as you want. This blog has the goal to help you to do so.

Reading, writing, listening and speaking are important skills that should be improved in order to learn another language. We think that reading is very important because it provides you opportunities to learn not only the language but also culture, vocabulary, customs, etc.

If we can read well, we will be able to analyze, understand and comprehend almost everything we want. Reading is like a key that helps you to open many doors of different aspects of our life.

This blog is focused on sharing you some of our techniques and strategies that we have used in order to improve our reading skill. We think you should be given enough strategies before starting a new English course because this could help you to get better results in this subject. It is important to say that these strategies have helpped us and we wish they could help you.

We have added some other strategies which have been suggested by other resources (you can get them under the tittle "More strategies").

• We consider that we all have different personalities, so we have to identify what kind of reading we like in order to establish a constant habit.

• Once we have identified our style, we should look for books, magazines, articles, etc. that can be interesting for us.

• During the reading, we suggest you not to use the dictionary for every single word you do not understand because we think it is better to get the meaning of those words by the context. This piece of advice could help you not to interrupt the reading; therefore, you save time and become more analytic.

• If a word is very important in the text and you cannot understand it by the context, look for its meaning and write it down. What works for us is to make a list with all those unknown words.
  

• Another point which is important for us is the place used for reading. We are convinced that the place where we read must provide us a good, comfortable, relaxing environment.

• Before the test, we usually practice the format of the reading used in our textbooks.
  

• We suggest you not to be stressed before or during the exam.

• In a test we usually have a limited time, so we think it is important to check how much time you have for the reading part and how many questions you have to answer. This can help you to distribute the time among the number of questions.

• If the reading is too long, something we do is not to read the entire text but read first the questions and then look directly for their answers.

• But if there are true/false questions, we suggest you to read all the text because many times this kind of exercises has tricky questions and you need to understand the reading in order to answer correctly.
  

• After receiving the grades of your reading test, we think it would be a good idea to analyze those strategies that you applied in the exam. This helps you to use those that worked and/or improve the ones that did not.