A non-fluent Latin reader painstakingly worked her way through this text
“Man is an obligate aerobe”, I recently read in a medicine book for general readers (Nuland, 1993). The phrase was noteworthy to me because it did something that rarely happens to an educated adult reader: it broke the automaticity of my reading. The phrase “obligate aerobe” was new to me and I had to look it up in the dictionary. In case you don’t know, either, an “obligate aerobe” is an organism that requires oxygen to live.
Without knowing exactly what the phrase meant, I could, of course, still guess the general idea: if not as an adjective, “obligate” was still familiar to me as a verb; I knew related words such as “oblige” and “obligation”, and their Latin root “obligare”; “aerobe” did look like it might be a combination of “air” and “microbe”, I knew “anaerobic”, and my mind also made an association with “aerobic exercise”.
All these considerations took me away from the content of the text and made me focus on the language itself. In other words, I had to do a bit of language learning before I could continue to learn about the physiology of dying – the primary purpose why I was reading that particular book in the first place.
This kind of language learning distraction happens extremely rarely to me in English and German, the two languages in which I am highly literate. However, it is very familiar from other languages I read with less fluency. The images show pages from my copy of Caesar’s Gallic War in Latin, which I read as a high school student. Given the copious notes on grammar and vocabulary my younger self left between the lines and in the margins, it must have been difficult to focus on the content. And it certainly was a slow read – the way I remember it, reading Gallic War took up most of Year 9.
Reading in Latin was a slow process for this 15-year-old, who, at the time, was already an accomplished German reader
Back to “obligate aerobe”: as a linguist, discovering a new turn of phrase always gives me pleasure. As a student of medicine, being forced to learn a new turn of phrase was an unwelcome distraction.
My experience was unusual in that I am primarily a linguist and only secondarily a – very amateur – student of medicine. Most readers are in a very different position: they read for the content, not for the language. In the vast majority of cases, the primary purpose of reading is to get new information and to learn new content. This is best achieved if reading is highly automatic.
Reading basically involves matching visual shapes – letters and larger chunks – with the words and expressions of a specific language. To do that efficiently, we not only need to be able to decode those visual shapes at extremely high speed but we also need to be able to retrieve the meaning of the words and expressions they represent at equally high speed. The larger our vocabulary and our general knowledge, the easier it is to do that.
The whole point of learning to read is ultimately reading to learn.
Education is designed with that purpose in mind: the early years of schooling are devoted to developing automaticity. By the time we reach secondary and higher education, literacy learning is no longer an aim in itself. By that point, the aim of literacy is to make us more efficient learners.
Caesar’s Gallic War is a puny little book of around 100 pages; at this pace, it took months to read.
For learners who hear the language of schooling from birth, who are then taught how to read and write that language in primary, and who have access to high-quality content in a wide variety of subjects throughout their further education and for the remainder of their lives, this can become a highly virtuous cycle.
After the saying “whoever has will be given more” from the Matthew Gospel, this virtuous cycle is known as the “Matthew Effect”: rich oral input in early life facilitates learning to read quickly and enjoyably; the latter, in turn, facilities ease of learning all kinds of content later in life.
In literacy research, the Matthew Effect is typically used to explain the reading gap between children from middle-class families who are exposed to the language of schooling in the early years and children from poor and/or minority backgrounds. For the latter group, having to learn the language of schooling at the same time as learning how to read can result in permanent educational disadvantage.
Much less research has been devoted to the gap that is experienced by students who have learned how to read in one language and then go on to read to learn in another language.
Back in the Middle Ages in Europe, the use of Latin as universal language of higher education constituted such a barrier to knowledge. As John Wycliffe, the first translator of the Bible into English, famously wrote in the 14th century: “[…] it helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ’s sentence.”
If English is the new Latin, are we slowing down the learning of students around the world?
His advocacy for the use of the mother tongue in religious education soon became a steady stream of critical debate over the use of Latin in higher education. “The main point of these critiques was that the use of foreign languages allowed professionals to mystify and so to dominate ordinary people” (Burke, 2004, p. 17).
By the 19th century, these reform efforts had largely been successful and the national languages had replaced Latin as the language of instruction in higher education. The change in the medium of instruction went hand in hand with an explosion in human knowledge: the flourishing of the sciences, the age of invention and discovery, the industrial revolution all happened after a variety of national languages had replaced Latin as the main medium in which knowledge was available.
Today, the trend is in the opposite direction, and English is fast becoming the predominant language of higher education. Inevitably, studying through the medium of English is easier for those who come to higher education as proficient readers of English. Conversely, proficient readers in another language will have to put in extra effort as they read to learn in English while, at the same time, still learning to read in English.
What are your experiences with reading to learn in another language?
References
Burke, P. (2004). Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nuland, S. B. (1993). How We Die. New York et al.: Random House.
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I appreciate your fantastic article once again. Your lectures and articles have liberated me from my obsession with using so-called authentic multi-modal materials like movies or TV news. Looking back, I realize that my most absorbing English learning experiences occurred when I read to learn and found joy in reading itself. It was in the 2nd Aviation Army library in Seoul.
I confess that I have been somewhat indifferent to the struggling readers in my school, justified by the burden of assessing too many students and preparing for national exams. Now, I believe that the sooner I intervene and help struggling readers, the quicker they will develop into expert readers with automaticity. Above all, I need to help my students experience the joy of reading and to read for learning. Sometimes, I might need to use compulsory tools such as evaluation. I won’t forget the Matthew effect in reading. I have many ideas to implement, such as having my students write reading notes regularly and conducting group presentations after the discussion of their chosen book. Thank you so much!
Thank you, Logan, for your kind words! That’s so good to read 🙂
When revising the topic of how to write a fabulous assignment, I want to return to this blog and share some reflections. As mentioned, the important stages of writing a fabulous assignment are Orientation and Structuring. These two stages require us to do a lot of readings. I think assignments are essential for students to practice learning autonomy as well as evaluate where they are on the learning journey. Thanks to the assignments, I have had a lot of opportunities to read materials and improve my English. When I read an article or a book to collect ideas, I feel very happy that I am doing what I love, and I can learn more vocabulary, phrases and the way authors write sentences as well as express their ideas. I also found out that the more I read, the more professional writing I achieve.
First, I would like to express my gratitude for sharing and keeping “Language on the Move” alive. It has provided me with an opportunity to connect with tweets and texts that depict the successes and struggles of migrants. Speaking of struggles, I vividly recall my high school days. Unlike the portrayal in Matthew’s gospel, my parents had to work really hard to make ends meet, and sometimes, the pursuit of literacy and becoming a proficient reader took a backseat to more immediate and mundane concerns.
However, there was a turning point that I am profoundly indebted to, and that was my encounter with “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Despite stumbling upon terms that my teenage self found unintelligible, Dostoevsky crafted a mesmerizing masterpiece that completely immersed me in the reading without allowing interruptions from doubts regarding my lack of understanding. I found myself connecting with thcontext, the characters and feeling the profound sense of emptiness of reaching “the end.”
Subsequently, I revisited the text, both in Spanish and in English, with greater confidence and the belief that meaningful experiences and successfully meeting basic needs are essential achievements for all human beings looking forward to thinking outside the box.
Crime and punishment has been the start of many reading careers, that’s for sure. Novels like these not only foster the love of reading but, as you say, the reader’s moral development. Hope you continue to enjoy ☺️
Dear Ingrid,
Thank you very much for your article. English is my second language, so I want to share my experience of learning English in English reading. As the Chinese Education Department attaches great importance to English teaching, especially the cultivation of students’ reading and writing skills, the textbooks include simple reading tasks since the introduction of English classes in the third grade of elementary school in many areas, and I am no exception. Primary school is the basic stage of English learning, so we only need to master basic English vocabulary and grammar. There are no difficult words and complex sentences in reading. The teacher asked us to read short articles from the recording and recite them, so as to cultivate our sense of English. We also need to memorize the spelling and meaning of basic vocabulary in reading and the teacher will dictate them the next day.
When I entered secondary school and high school, reading become the largest part of the English test. The length is gradually longer (each article is about 200-400 words), and there are some difficult words. We need to read quickly within the specified time passage, understand its content and complete reading comprehension questions. The teacher usually requires us to prepare a word book, read the article carefully after answering the reading comprehension questions, copy the unfamiliar words in the word book and look up their meanings, and also need to sort out some fixed phrase collocations and grammatical sentence structures. I still think this is a very useful way to improve English literacy.
After I came to Macquarie University to study Ingrid’s Languages and Cultures in Contact unit, she introduced us to a website for searching etymology, which is very helpful for me to learn English vocabulary. In the subsequent English reading, I often use this website to search for the etymology of some words. I also hope to find some useful methods for me from the comments of other students on learning English through reading.
Thanks, Siyao! You are right – the process you describe is a time-honoured way to learn to read in a second language. The only drawback is that it can get really tedious and students may not experience much joy with reading … also, so glad to hear your keep using the OED database ☺️
I appreciate your article and seminar! Looking back, I studied English reading to prepare for the exam, including the English teacher exam.
I started reading to learn when I was in the U.S. military for two years. I had much free time but no distractions like a cell phone or laptop. Luckily, the library was well-stocked so I could read English novels, magazines, and comic books for free. It was a time when I could read for fun without the pressure of an English test.
When I think about my reading activities with my high school students, I see that I have been trying to move them from learning to read to reading to learn. I’ve been doing activities like reading The Giver for a semester without a translation, making book leaflets, and letting students show how they solve their questions by reading related books.
Helping my students have automaticity and experience reading for learning and pleasure through my lessons would be gratifying. I will continue to enjoy reading for learning and reading for pleasure myself.
Thanks, Logan! A well-stocked library is such a blessing!
Reading in English started in high school for me, even though I had started learning and using it in my speaking a few years back. I remember how frustrating it was compared to reading Farsi texts at the time which I had been more exposed to in my education at school. Flash forward to my bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Language at university, we were required to educate ourselves using various English language resources in different domains of readings like Linguistics, literature, translation, history, and politics. After a while, I found English texts to be an easy means of expanding my knowledge after all.
Interestingly, my experience with reading German was not as time-consuming as with English as far as I remember (even though I never developed as much of a proficient reader). With English, every line needed a good number of guesses and even after having a list of underlined words and meaning next to it, I still wasn’t sure if this is any kind of effective or useful learning. In my initial experience with German texts, however, I naturally found myself remembering/guessing and picking up the words that I had seen quite easier. As someone already literate in English reading, I absolutely enjoyed German reading as well and showed better performance compared to other students with somehow less English literacy. It was fascinating to make the observation here and share the experience of English being inevitably the most convenient language for many higher-education seekers.
Thanks, Arghavan! Interesting reflection about learning to read in a 3rd language. For me, English was my 3rd language and similar to your German. The way I remember it, it was nowhere near as hard as learning to read in Latin … same for Spanish and French, but very different with Persian – trying to develop fluency with a new script is really hard, once the content of primers and easy readers is boring but you don’t have the skills to read anything more interesting 😔
Thank you for sharing your interesting experience! It reminds me of my uni time in Vietnam when I had a unit called “English Literature”. As my major was English teaching, the course included some units expanding students’ knowledge on English literature and culture. At that time, my teacher told us to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 before class. As a literature lover who approached several Vietnamese novels and poems from a very young age, I knowed Sonnet 18’s worth a read when my teacher told me that it was one of the most ubiquitous poems of English literature.
However, it took longer to understand the poem than I thought. I wondered a thousand times what “thee”, “thou”, “thy” meant. Moreover, as it was my first time reading literature in English, the way Shakespeare used metaphor and comparison was quite confusing to me. It went without saying that I couldn’t feel Sonnet 18 for the first few times and couldn’t realise how wonderful language was used in this poem. I had to seek the help of Google to know the meaning of some words and phrases, and also read some analysis from others. At that time, I could feel that the purpose of that unit- deepening into English culture and literature, was not achieved because what I did was learning to read literature, not reading to learn from literature.
Now, five years later, I feel like I’m enjoying English literature more than ever before. By reading more literature books in English, I can get the ideas without trying to look up words and phrases that much. It’s only then can I feel how beautiful English literature is.
Thanks, Chloe! I love Shakespeare’s sonnets but starting your journey in English literature with them would be tough, particularly if there is no or little scaffolding from the teacher …
Learning a language where it is used predominantly may create much room for ‘reading to learn’, which is the case of my Korean learning in South Korea ten years ago.
Upon arrival, I barely remembered the Hangul, only being able to read slowly but having no vocabulary to make sense of any text. The pressure to achieve the ‘novice reader’ phase quickly was real. My tactic was surrounding myself with texts – signs, notices, billboards, maps, tickets, etc. Also, navigating the university’s learning site in Korean, with help of dictionary and lots of guessing. The most fascinating thing when reading these texts is that I occasionally could infer meanings of the Sino-Korean vocabulary quickly, thanks to its similarity to my first language, Vietnamese. The ‘decoding’ phase, thus, was so exciting and motivating that after a few months, I was able to read some news articles, and even used the Korean version of a textbook for my course there.
While I’m still far from being a fluent reader in Korean, it was the reading practice in those early days that developed my passion for linguistics. Recently, I’m enjoying reading short stories in the language, hoping to move closer to the next literacy stage.
That’s brilliant – great to read about the virtuous reading cycle in action in your experience!
As a secondary school student, English was (and still is) a compulsory subject and one of my favourite subjects. I have always loved the sound of English and I was determined to be proficient in that language. I remember having to read texts and not being able to understand most of them, which was very frustrating to me. I believe this was mainly due to my limited vocabulary as well as my inability to apply chunking at the time.
It was only when I had the opportunity, at the young age, to move to an English speaking country for several years that I was gradually able to decode that language.
Personally, I wouldn’t say that my vocabulary expanded from reading books, as I have never been a great reader. Instead, I used to pick up new words or expressions from all kinds of social interactions.
You are missing out on one of life’s great pleasures if you are not reading … have a look at the Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge – maybe you’ll find some inspiration there 🙂
Looking around the comments, as an international student, I can totally understand how challenging it is to study English as a second language. Other than English, I also had to learn Chinese characters when I was younger. Because Korea is one of the most influenced countries by Chinese culture, literacy in Chinese was considerably essential to understand school classes many years ago. Especially, to understand Korean literature, it must be learnt to pass the course. I remember that I used to write down Chinese characters repeatedly in my exercise notebook until I could memorise them.
Although English is fast-becoming the predominant language throughout the world, as you mentioned above, I assume that Chinese character, at least in Korea, is also dominant in higher education. In the past, media used to use both Korean and Chinese characters, and in present, Chinese characters no longer are used in media as its own forms. In other words, we use Chinese characters in Korean with the same meanings.
Looking back at myself, as the one who wants to become a fast-reader, it is certain that I should continue to learn Chinese characters as well as English for the Matthew effect.
So true about keeping up both languages! And even if English is dominant now, its preeminent position may well be in the process of being displaced by Chinese …
I agree with that. I’m looking forward to seeing how international relationships will go! Thank you for your interesting article and comment!
Hello Jaehoon, I have found some interesting information from you. I did not know that Chinese had and still has such significance in the education system of Korea. I know Korean celebrities know basic Chinese or Japanese but I thought it’s because of their contract or something. But after reading what you said I understood that it’s not celebrities but all Korean students who learn Chinese. I guess it’s because some areas of Korea was once colonized by China, so to learn the history you need to learn the language? I know about the Japanese invasion of Korea but I have no idea if something similar happened between Korea and China. Thank you for sharing this fascinating information. I might look into the reason behind why Korean students need to learn Chinese since you have roused my curiosity.
The most struggling moment of language learning was when I switched the medium of language instruction from Chinese to English in my first year of high school. Although I had been working hard on expanding my content vocabulary through the textbooks of every subject, it was still an obstacle to expressing myself in English in oral and written forms. Luckily, there was an extensive reading program introduced at my school. Through this award reading program, I started to build my reading habit with the graded readers by picking the easiest ones and advanced gradually to 6 levels higher in a year. After voluminous reading for pleasure, I could construct meaningful sentences without drilling hard on grammar. By matching readers that were appropriate to my level, my reading fluency improved without using much of the dictionary. Nowadays, I would not regard myself as a great fan of reading, but if there are topics that draw my deep interest, I would definitely go for in-depth reading. My personal experience is a lively example of transforming from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’.
Reading award programs are a great way to get students to read. You could consider joining the Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge: https://www.languageonthemove.com/language-on-the-move-reading-challenge-2023/
Hi, Pineapplebun. Your experience proves that extensive reading is very useful for developing receptive and productive skills. When I was reading your comment, I was thinking about some Japanese people who argue that their speaking skills are low just because of poor English education and the lack of opportunities to speak English in Japan. Their opinions may be true, but your comment has made me ponder another reason for their low English speaking proficiency: the lack of reading for pleasure. Many Japanese students only read English textbooks and the amount of input is quite limited. They might not realize the significance of reading to develop other skills including speaking proficiency.
Also, as you said, your personal experience demonstrates how ‘learning to read’ was transformed into ‘reading to learn’. I think the important point is that you developed habits of reading books through the process. You became used to reading in high school and you still read books that attract your attention to learn. Increasing such students must be one of the jobs English teachers should do.
I started to learn to read in English at the age of nine in Japan. My primary purpose in learning English was to be as fluent as my first language and pass examinations. In 2015, when I studied linguistics in England as an exchange student, I read to learn in English for the first time in my life. I still remember having great difficulty in reading articles and writing essays in English. This experience made me realize the importance of English teachers facilitating reading to learn in English in an English classroom.
In the high school where I taught, many students are raised in middle-class families, while some grow up in working-class communities, resulting in a noticeable gap in their literacies in both Japanese and English alike, like children in the three communities we learned in class. Nevertheless, I wanted my students to read to learn as well as learn to read in an additional language due to my experience in England. Therefore, content and language integrated learning was occasionally implemented in my class. Understandably, it was challenging for them to read to learn in a language that is not completely mastered, but I kept in mind to use vocabulary familiar to them and secure time for group activities. While I was taking this week’s class, I realized that such consideration to fill the gap aligns closely with the Matthew Effect. From these experiences, I learned that teachers constantly need to take students’ educational backgrounds into account, since teachers themselves are often successful learners who can read to learn in an additional language.
Good point, Japanda! Teachers are usually highly successful learners themselves … CLIL is a great way to create a naturalistic environment where students can experience a foreign language with a real purpose.
For the first time to learn Japanese, I was literally ‘a beginner’. Both then and now, Korea and Japan have a close relationship, which is why many friends who were studying with me at the time were already fluent in Japanese. My friends demonstrated strengths in listening and speaking. I thought the highest value in language ability can be demonstrated from their speaking ability until I came to Australia and encountered new challenge within English.
After I moved to Australia and started struggling to develop my English language skills, I couldn’t help but admitting that I was wrong. Second Language Acquisition I took last semester was one of the most beneficial lessons and it changed my thought a lot. In SLA view, reading is crucial as it facilitates vocabulary expansion, enhancing grammar through contextual exposure, promoting writing skills and fluency through well-structured textual examples and the natural flow of the language.
Recently I have started reading a little bit every day about my areas of interest, which are English education, psychology, and the Bible, and to organise my thoughts in English on my blog. I ultimately hope that it will greatly help improve my English skills.
Good to hear that your studies have transformed your personal practice! Daily reading is incredibly enriching and blog writing is a great way to practice and gain confidence – as is commenting on other blogs 😉
Thank you for the interesting article. I believe that when you have grown up in a country where English is used as a foreign language at the time, before social media, you did not get too many opportunities for unintentional English reading. Of course, they taught reading at school, and there were some English books in the library, but the interest and motivation towards learning was in an important role in a learner’s life.
I did not have it. I have always been such a perfectionist in learning another language, that I could not stand the feeling of not understanding or stop the reading only to find the meaning of unfamiliar word. I have tried to read something familiar, such as Harry Potter that I had already read in Finnish, but it did not feel good. To be honest, I still do not enjoy reading too much, especially if the topic is not interesting enough, but I have had to learn to put up with it so to say. Also, I believe now that we have needed to read multiple articles during the years at the university, it has gotten easier and will get easier in the future.
Thanks, Em! Practice makes perfect, as they say. A good way to start reading in a foreign language are easy readers and/or bilingual books …
Thanks for sharing your experience, Em. I could relate to the lack of opportunities for unintentional English reading as in my country in the 2000s, before the social media era. Foreign books were also a luxury at that time, so our exposure to English was quite limited to textbooks. But those classic textbooks were how I learned to read in English. I remembered the frustration when not being able to understand a text despite already looking up all the words, but I guess it is normal when learning to read in any foreign language.
I only started picking up some English-language literature during my bachelor’s degree, just because it was required in the course. A strange experience, I’d say – as the teaching and learning of the literature was done in much a Vietnamese education style, although our lecturers talked in English in the lesson. I couldn’t feel much the value of the works. Nowadays, while I feel comfortable reading anything in English, literature is the only area that does not give me enough excitement to pick up a book. I’m just wondering whether this feeling may change if I start reading a new novel now, in our current rich English environment.
You should start a new novel and try it out 🙂
Thank you for your fascinating article. I would also like to share my personal experience with reading in English. Growing up, my father was passionate about the language and taught me before I even started school. I first started reading the English version of “Harry Potter” but found it challenging. I was frequently preoccupied with unfamiliar vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and content. I spent a lot of time translating each new word to comprehend the text fully. However, when I had the opportunity to study in an English programme in secondary school, my language skills significantly improved. Reading novels in English became much easier as I became more accustomed to the language’s nuances, idiomatic expressions, and colloquialisms.
Thanks, Luna! Reading is a virtuous circle: the more you read, the easier and more enjoyable it becomes ☺️
Thanks for your article, Ingrid!
English is my second language and since I came to Australia for higher education, I experienced both “learning to read” and “reading to learn” in the same time. Some articles contain many advanced vocabularies which made me cannot understand the content or main ideas of those articles. To understand them, I used both Google translation and dictionary and noted down the meaning between the lines and in the margins as you did. There was one time that a text took me nearly 8 hours to search the meaning and understand the whole text. These language practices made me out of energy; however, I always believe that today’s long hours will pay off later which means that I can acquire a higher literacy level that I will not need to use dictionary and translation to read a text. Recently, I can read many specialised texts without using other means. I think the Matthew Effect is correct in my case, the more I read and gain vocabularies, the more I comprehend the content and enlarge knowledge.
Keep up the good work! 👏👏👏
It is a big challenge for young age students who use languages which are not the language in their school to read and understand the meaning of textbooks, especially for immigrant students or students from minority communities. Their L1 is not strong enough to be the foundation to develop their L2. As an adult learner and reader, I can easily understand the meaning by using translation tools. However, young age learners cannot understand the meaning even in L1, so it’s really hard for them to understand in L2, and it may lead to both languages are underachieved. I think the multilingual schools should provide them some linguistic supports to fill the gap between L1 and L2 such as create bilingual environment or activities in which they can practice and improve their L1 and L2, or based on their language proficiency, the schools can provide some bilingual books so that they practice both languages.
Thanks, Brownie, for these important reflections! Being mindful of the dual challenge faced by young multilingual learners is undoubtedly the first step. Only with recognition of the problem can we start to find improvements.
Thanks a lot for an interesting post!
I have to say, reading skills are never easy for me. Your blog reminds me of five years ago when I was studying hard to prepare for the IELTS exam. Among the four skills, I was less confident with reading tasks. At that time, my English vocabulary was poor, and I struggled with reading tasks. My teachers showed me some strategies to get higher scores, such as reading the questions before reading the text, skimming through the passage, paying attention to the introduction and conclusion, identifying keywords, and learning more synonyms. It is true that those tips helped me get higher scores on the tests. But I realized I needed to improve my reading and understand the text clearly, not just pass the IELTS tests to study overseas. So, after coming to Sydney, I decided to read more English books. The more I read, the more I understand how beautiful English is. In the beginning, I chose some English novels for beginners, such as Lord of the Flies, The Old Man and the Sea. I took note of all the new words, tried to remember them and hoped to use them one day. Then I tried myself with Harry Potter (but I already watched all the movies before). I felt that reading is a great way to learn new words, expand my vocabulary, and enhance my imagination in another language. Reading is not difficult as I thought in the past, it was difficult to find what you like to read.
Thanks, Lynn! Discovering “how beautiful English is” (or any other language you read fluently) is such a great gift!
Have you read Build your house around my body by Violet Kupersmith? It’s an English-language novel set in Vietnam and the setting might make it a good read for you …
Thanks for your suggestion! I will give it a go 🙂
Dr. Piller, thank you for sharing your experience as a learner. I don’t have an honest attempt to learn a new language other than English and my first language which is Arabic. But, during the pandemic and the lockdown, I tried to learn psychology online and in order to do that, I had to improve my English to understand the new topics and ideas. So, I took two free online courses at University of Toronto with Dr. Jordan Peterson called “Personality and its Transformations” and “Maps of Meaning” which they were about 40 lectures with 2 hours for each lecture. And the amount knowledge and vocabulary that I have acquired was unbelievably remarkable. And it just kept going from there. I got really interested in psychology and kept listening to podcasts and interviews in English for psychology professors. And for me, that subsequentially improved my English and took it to another level. Although it might not seem to be the same experience as learning a new language, it indeed felt like it. I was advised once as a teacher to go and try to learn a new language in order to feel how hard and overwhelming it is for your students. And maybe I should give it a try!
It’s not the number of languages that matters but the quality … podcasts are a great way to learn new things and improve language proficiency on the side.
Thank you Ingrid for providing us with another great post. Reading this brings me back to when I was 12, when I received two English novels as a gift, one is Jane Eyre and the other is Romeo and Juliet. Both of them were part of the Oxford Bookworms collection for language learners. I remember encountering new words every other 5 words and had to search for them on my huge 4kg dictionary book, then note down the meaning. Eventually, every page was filled with my handwritten notes, and by the end of the books, I learned heaps of new words, but could barely recall the storylines. It was not the best experience, but I learned a lot. On looking up on Google for the details of the book for this comment, I now realized that the books were for advanced learners, not for a 12-year-old beginner in learning English…
Indeed, Lilly, tough choices for a 12-year-old English learner – but all for the good, I suppose 🙂
Thank you, Ingrid, for another interesting topic. Reading is definitely one of the important aspects that language learners need to acquire well. For my personal experience as a language learner, reading was one of the hardest one. While reading, I always used to be bothered by the new vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure and content unfamiliarity. I used to spend so much time on translating every single new word in order to fully understand them. Especially when it came to testing such as IELTS, TOEFL, anxiety/stress made reading even harder. I had to focus on context plus other small details in a small amount of time.
I truly enjoy reading especially literature novels. Since it is a foreign language, I still find difficulties in reading, but now I concentrate more on the context rather than other details. But sometimes when I read in English, I don’t get the same feeling or go beyond or assimilate as I read in my own language.
You are right – if the main point of reading is test performance, that can really ruin it for the learner. Glad you are in a better reading space now 🙂
Recently, I decided to read English novels with the aim of improving my English. My expressions in English have been influenced by the way I think in Vietnamese. By reading novels in English, I hope that my English writing will be more native-like. At first, I tried reading ebooks on my phone. Every time I came across a new, I looked it up to find its meaning; therefore, I could not focus on the content of the book and felt bored after a few pages. Now I’ve changed to traditional reading. I read some classic books and try to guess the meanings of words or just skip those words if they do not affect the general idea of the story. It is really challenging to read classic novels because of different genres and text types compared to the academic texts which I usually read. One issue with reading to learn a language is that if I focus on words and grammar, I barely understand the story, but if I get into a good flow in the story, I hardly care about what structures and words are used in the text.
Hi Audrey, last year I read Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind, which I loved. If you haven’t read it in Vietnamese, maybe try it in English? And another suggestion: maybe try contemporary fiction instead of classical novels? Much more relatable, I would think 🙂 I’ve heard good things about a new Vietnamese-Australian novel that came out earlier this year but haven’t had a chance to read it yet: Vivian Pham, The Coconut Children
Such an interesting topic! My most significant attempt at reading in another language (so far) has been the classic French story ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I picked up a copy in French when I was travelling years ago, and because I had read it in English and because it was so short and can be read by children as well as adults I thought I would put my broken university French to the test… What followed was not a smooth, natural reading process but rather a foray into French language, history and literature as I had to stop and look up word after word, reference after reference in this beautiful but deceptively complex allegorical tale. I’m not sure to what extent I ‘read’ the text, so much as decoded it as best I could, but it was nonetheless a deeply satisfying process for me which brought many unexpected discoveries along the way!
Agree – even slow tortuous decoding can make for a reading journey of discovery!
Hi Ingrid and thank you for another insightful post!
I have the privilege to say English was taught to me from an early age in my country, as this does not happen very often. However, it was just another course. After 90 minutes, two days a week, the content in English would vanish for Spanish to be reintroduced in our school lives. Since I was also keen on learning French, I attended a French language school for a few years. Again, the same case of restriction applied here.
After graduating from high school, I pursued a bachelor’s degree in translation and interpreting. It was in university where I truly began to read academic texts in English and French and acquire ideas. English and French were not the purpose anymore—they were the means to understand, question, share ideas, and take a more proactive role in my education.
I can say this prepared me for this master’s program. Although there are some readings that come across as a bit more tedious than other ones periodically, I try to make the best out of them and go over them more than once.
Thanks for reading!
Alex
Thanks, Alex! Sadly, some academic texts carry their poor readability like a badge of honor … personally, I’ve learned to stay away from those 😉
Quite an interesting view on reading and language rather than the content itself. I was intrigued with your example of the pages from Caesar’s Gallic War in Latin. Similarly, in High school it reminded me how I had to interpret Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Although his plays are not entirely in a different language, it does have a unique style of language used. However, if you read through his scripts, you can figure out what certain words meant in that phrase much like the example “obligate aerobe”.
I am fortunate to be able to fluently read in English and Polish. The letters are almost the same, with a few added letters in the Polish alphabet. However, reading certain ‘letters/sounds’ are pronounced differently as they would in English. For example, in English the /w/ sound is almost identical to the ‘ł’ letter. Isn’t that interesting.
That is a fun fact! And the best way to remember it is with this city name: “Łódź” is pronounced [wutɕ] …
Hi Ingrid I really enjoyed this reading. My favourite quote was:
“The whole point of learning to read is ultimately reading to learn.” Although I do think there is value in simply reading for pleasure, even then we are learning. I find it fascinating that most reading started out being predominantly in Latin which was inaccessible to many except the elites. Eventually texts were translated into many languages becoming more accessible but today we are going back to using predominantly one language, English. I wonder if this taking a step backwards towards elitism rather than celebrating the diversity of multilingualism and globalism.
My L1 is English and I learned to read at a very young age. I was reading children’s novels alone by age 3 and could read and write fluently before I started school which was a great asset and gave me confidence. My L2 is French and in Canada French is written everywhere so I have had a lot of opportunity to read it on simple, everyday items but reading longer official texts and novels is very challenging for me, the grammar, the gender, the slang, the humour is all so very different. I always enjoyed learning French but it does not come easily to me and I cannot imagine doing a masters level subject in French. I have so much admiration for my classmates who manage to do these courses in their L2 or L3. I do read French regularly but it feels very much like a chore and not a pleasure though I hope one day it will be enjoyable.
My L3 is Japanese, which I started as a University exchange student and thoroughly enjoyed although I did not reach a very high level despite years of studying. I learned hiragana and katakana very quickly and found speaking and pronunciation fairly straightforward. Kanji however was so very challenging, I only learned about 250 and over 2500 are need for basic reading. The fact that there are Japanese pronunciations and Chinese pronunciations and the pronunciation changes depends on which other kanji they are next to was very confusing all mixed together with the hiragana and katakana. Very interesting but very challenging.
Thanks, Ally! I didn’t mean to say that there is a clear-cut difference between reading for learning and reading for pleasure; I mean every novel, every poem, every story teaches us something … and academic knowledge is but one form of knowledge.
Thank you Ingrid for another interesting post. The three languages that I know are Farsi, English, and French, and I would say reading could be the key skill to learn those languages or any foreign language in general. I wasn’t surrounded by native speakers of English or French, but reading bedtime stories, or later reading books in target languages, made learning smoother and more enjoyable. I have to admit that practising reading seemed to be dreadful, but the more I persist, the stronger and better my language skills became. It was to point that anything with English or French text on it, I would use as a reading practice. Reading is for sure key element to learn!
Thanks, Sue! You are right, even the labels on a cereal box can be a practice opportunity …
When I was a junior high school student, I started studying English as one of the compulsory subjects. Studying English focused on improving vocabulary and phrases and learning grammar points through reading practices for passing examinations of the university until high school. At this time, since I felt English was difficult to achieve a high score on exams, I became dislike English. However, after graduated from high school, I luckily developed my reading skills to understand the content and sometimes enjoyed reading it. This was because I went to university preparatory school for a year and continued studying English, especially reading, for going to a university with a high deviation value. Then I kept studying English for my bachelor’s degree, which was the most challenging for me to understand the journal article about international cooperation written in English. One of the reasons for the most challenging was insufficient my English skills, particularly reading skills and vocabulary. Another reason for the challenge was inadequate of the background knowledge of international cooperation. At that moment, I could not guess the meaning of words in the articles. Those experiences were very stressful for me. However, I kept studying English and my English became the current English level. Although I still feel difficulties to understand content from academic journal articles, I keep learning new knowledge from content through reading articles because of the interest in knowing what I do not know.
Thanks, Yuta! Learning new content through a language one has not fully mastered yet is really tough. Glad you made it!
I have to confess that I have no experience with reading to learn in another language. I can imagine though how difficult it must be particularly for those studying at the post graduate level where so much reading is required. In learning Japanese, I have had to confront learning to read hiragana, katakana and limited kanji. Having to learn Japanese through these scripts has slowed down the learning process as it makes it difficult for me to memorize new words and slows down the reading speed dramatically. (It is however, necessary as Romanized Japanese can take you only so far!) I therefore can imagine the difficulty of actually having to use this language to study something such as philosophy or linguistics. Likewise, those students at Macquarie for whom English is a second language I can feel how hard it must be. They are a source of inspiration to spoiled me who has had the privilege of learning English from birth in a natural setting, whenever I feel overwhelmed by my (English) reading load!
Thanks, Peter! You are right that learning a new language with a new script is extra hard, even if the script itself is relatively straightforward because it slows down every aspect of the language learning process. And adults don’t like going back to the ‘decoding reader’ stage and, even less so, being stuck there for a long time … another example of the (negative) Matthew Effect in action …
Thanks, Ingrid! This article makes me remember when I was about ten years old. My uncle gave me some classic fairy tales books after he returned from his business trip abroad. Since that day, I have enjoyed reading English fairy tales. I found out that it was a great way to better understand the English culture. These familiar stories helped me learn new words and collocations, get to know English morals and manners as well.
Fairy tales are a great way to start learning to read, be it in the first language or an additional language.
Thank you for this interesting topic. I always enjoy your writing. I started reading since I was in high school. Biography and romantic novel were the first types of books that I was interested in such as Princess Diana, Anne Frank (German diarist), Marie Curie (French-Polish physicist), Mother Teresa, and so on. It was a good and easy type of book to start reading. Sometimes, I cannot find the difficult vocabulary in the dictionary such as old and informal language. Therefore, Google is a good alternative to find a strange vocabulary.
I love (auto)biographies of strong women, too!
My personal experience with language learning has been a very interesting and confusing one for myself. The two languages I know are English and Greek, which I was taught at the same time. To say that one is my L1 and the other my L2 still confuses me to this day as my earliest memory is of myself speaking both languages together, in the form of Greeklish. I believe that Read to Learn English phase occurred for me during primary school, as one day I recall trying to explain something to a teacher in Greek instead of English. To this day, I find myself in that Read to Learn phase in both languages, therefore I come to the conclusion that in my own case, I don’t have one dominant language over the other, however, they work in unison.
Interesting reflections, Christina! Reading to learn is something all of us do throughout our lives. After all, the point of acquiring literacy is not usually literacy in itself but to be able to access the content that is stored in texts. That’s why we say that the reading journey starts with learning to read and the aim is to make reading so automatic that we no longer need to think about the technical side of reading (like decoding letters, matching them to sounds, figuring out words etc.) but can fully concentrate on understanding the text.
Thanks for posting the fascinating topic this week, Ingrid. And I’m glad to share my experience. When I was a preschooler, my mother showed me an English animation movie, Snow White, and I used to sing along without knowing the meaning of the song in the movie. My mom printed out the lyrics and taught me the exact pronunciation with the meaning. I think that’s when I first read English, which is my L2. English is one of the compulsory subjects in Korea, so I had many opportunities to learn English in my school days. Especially, I was fascinated by Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth night’, which I learned briefly at the English institution, so I read a lot of Shakespeare’s works for a while. Finding words I didn’t know in those works helped me learn English a lot. Also, when I went to high school, I fell in love with Harry Potter movies and watched them with English subtitles and bought a Harry Potter English novel and read them. Reading books in English, converting them into Korean, and imagining the scene helped improve my English skills.
Thanks, Subin! Harry Potter really has done more to boost global literacy levels than many schools 😉
Hi Ingrid,
This article made me think long ago how I started to learn to read in English. my L2 is English , but as I was in English medium school, I learn my native language ( Bengali) and English side by side. But I became a proficient novel reader in English when I was doing my undergrad. As my undergrad subject was English, I was reading all famous English literature in English. But most of this literature I read in Bengali in my High school year so I knew the content or plot already which helped me a lot not to go through dictionary for each time I come across an unknown word. Also, in my first year of undergrad I started to learn synonyms systematically as for example, at least five words a day. I became familiar with phonetics symbol which helped me in pronunciation ( Now with the advent of technology it became easier to learn correct pronunciation by using different Apps. There is common trend for ESL students to learn the gist in their native language ( those who are literate in other language) and produce it in English. and I applied this in my upper primary ESL class which worked for some students. Although grammar translation method is not popular anymore but for some instance it really worked. Students were confident to learn the content in their own language and then translated it in English using bilingual dictionary. When they increased their bank of vocabulary they became more and more confident in reading and using those words in their writing.
Thanks, Nusrat! I agree that grammar translation method has a role to play in a mix of language teaching methods. I think the way it has been demonized has done a lot of harm, particularly where it was replaced with the sink-or-swim approach of English medium instruction. Content learning and language learning are two different processes, and while they can be harnessed to support each other, that’s often not the case in reality …
I totally agree with this idea that rich oral learning in the early years of our lives help us build ourselves as an expert in the later years and we began to enjoy reading and learning by that time. For instance , in my country i.e. Pakistan, English language dominates educational and professional lives of people throughout their lives. I grew up in tri-lingual , my mother tongue(L1) is the Hindco, my second language(L2) is Urdu , and my third language (L3) or the official language of the country is English . I have often found myself getting distracted by the language> i learnt two languages at school simultaneously , and third a acquired from my parents. All three languages have all together different cultural history and influence. I had often faced issues in decoding L3 ( English) into my L1(Hindco) & L2 (Urdu). Urdu that has its origin in Persian language rarely helped me to interpret meanings of English. As you said , my English got better only when I made myself a voracious reader of English. I almost read every kind of English text in the beginning without choosing any specific kind. i read newspapers, fiction, non-fiction, advertisements in English, magazines etc.
Thanks, Kinza! Are you literate in all three languages? And do you read and write different things in different languages?
There is more to mention. I read Islamic scripture in Arabic and also I belong to another linguistic community which is Punjabi. My familiarity with these two language is not much as of my interest and limited exposure with the speaker but certainly I do understand and can read text very easily. My primary focus remained English and Urdu and I believe that I have good reading and writing skills in these languages.
My second language is German and I read it fluently. Nowadays I read German mostly for pleasure, but have previously read academic texts for study. Even though I am a proficient reader, I still find that I need to keep practising reading in German or else I can feel myself getting rusty. I therefore always alternate between reading English and German novels. I have waited for the moment when German becomes as comfortable to read as English, but it has never come!
If it’s any consolation, my L1 is German but I mostly prefer to read English books. I find them less convoluted 😉
Hi Ingrid!
Looking at the way you circled and highlighted words and phrases in your book reminds me of the time when I took the unit of Second Language Acquisition at university in my country. It was the first time that I had ever read the textbook which was not only written in English but also full of strange technical terms and new content. So, it was extremely difficult and challenging for me to read and take in the new knowledge. I underlined, highlighted new words, grammar phrases, and used my dictionary a lot to get what each chapter was about. Prior to class, the teacher required every student in the class to read the material, take notes of any key points or questions for further discussion. It took me hours just to read one chapter that was about 20 pages long. At that time, it was really a nightmare and pressure for me and the other students. However, the longer I got involved in reading the book, the better and faster my reading was. It was because the key terms and ideas kept appearing throughout the book. Besides, reading the book also improved my writing skills in that it provided me with lots of useful academic vocabulary and new structures to form better complex sentences. The point that I want to stress is that reading in English may be quite daunting in the very first stages, but if you are patient and hard working enough, you can not only read to learn and broaden your knowledge but also improve your English skills.
Indeed, practice makes perfect ☺️
Interesting read!
Personally, I am fluent in reading 4 languages at present: Norwegian, English, German and Icelandic.
Reading to learn is significant when it comes to properly learn a new language. Especially for beginners and early intermediate learners. Reading and writing the language forms the foundation of the learner’s language. However, these rules specifically apply to languages with the same written language as yourself. For example, I learnt Mandarin Chinese for 2 years, and learning to write and read was incredibly difficult in comparison to speaking and listening. This also applies to other languages with complex writing systems, like Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.
So, it is all relative to the language you are learning, in my opinion. Basically, languages with complex writing systems would be close to impossible to read to learn, without knowing the vocabulary and grammar of the language beforehand. How is somebody going to know what “你好吗?” says, unless they would know the equivalent transcription in Pinyin, for example?
Anyway, when the languages are purely written in Latin, it makes reading to learn significantly easier, and it makes the process of learning the language’s vocabulary, grammar and syntax way more linear. You can go through vocabulary you read, translate it, note it down and repeat. While learning how the language is structured by physically seeing how words are written down, and not just through spoken language.
On the other hand, this can be difficult in complex languages. For example, Hungarian is written in the Latin script but is incredibly complex in terms of grammar, syntax and pronunciation. Purely learning through reading here can be difficult. First of all, Hungarian is an agglutinative language, which means words consist of one “Root” word (For example: Szeret – Love), which is combined with different prefixes and suffixes to indicate the tense, subject and object of the word (Szeretlek – I love you). This means the word used as the root will always be consistent, but the prefixes and suffixes change drastically and form full sentences in just one word, causing long, complex words. Here are some examples of the different varieties of “Szeret”: Szeretlek (I love you, as previously mentioned), Szeretem (I like), Szereted (You like), Szereti-e őt? (Does he love her?), etc.
This is just an example of one language which can prove to be complicated when learning through reading (through the perspective of a primarily Germanic language speaker), as the grammar and vocabulary are so different to the rules and principles of the first language, therefore, more instruction and practice will be needed outside of pure reading in some cases.
Great observations about the relationship between language learning and reading, Chris! Another point to add might be that this kind of language learning is very visual and typical of people with a high level of formal education. This PhD thesis by Vera Williams Tetteh includes an exploration of language learning in very different oral and low-literacy contexts: https://www.languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Final-PhD-thesis_Vera-Williams-Tetteh.pdf
Hi Ingrid!
Back in a day, when my journey of learning English was at its beginning, every English text looked like your Latin book! I would underline the words, make side notes, I would even note those more interesting words in my notebook. I would note them with a definition and a few example sentences. Even today when I read some kind of an article and there is a work that is unfamiliar to me, I simply cannot just leave it or skip it. I need to look it up, take a screenshot (technology yay!) and think of how would I use it (mental example sentence) then I put that screenshot in my “Dictionary” folder.
Oh a personal dictionary – great idea! 🙌🏼
Thank you for giving me an opportunity to look back my reading experiences in another language, partIcularly English for me. When I was around 9 years old, I read a picture book written in English for the first time. At the time, I just enjoyed the contents, thus I did not read it to develop my language skills. However, once I entered a junior high school, the purpose of reading English was generally changed to improvement of the language skills, for example vocabulary and idioms, because of the examination-oriented education. Since I felt that reading English became more boring at the time, I came to dislike reading it.
Yet, when I was a senior high school student, I luckily realised that I could enjoy reading English if I got any right information from the contents. After the moment, I got to like it again. Then, my English proficiency became the current level, even though I still sometimes have difficulties to comprehend contents especially of academic journal articles in unfamiliar areas. What I realised from this reflection is that I personally like reading English to gather information and knowledge from the materials rather than to merely improve the English skills. I hope to teach the interest to reading English to my future students.
Thanks, Kyohei! Imparting a love of reading is one of the greatest gifts a teacher can give to their students. Conversely, turning students off reading is a real tragedy, and one that is sadly not unusual to occur in schools.
I think my reading experience in English is quite diverse, ranging from academic textbooks to superhero comics, novels, some movie-related review websites, gaming, or maybe even random but intriguing topics I found on the internet. From the very beginning level, as you mentioned in the article, these readings took me ages to highlight and look new words/phrases up. The pages were packed with a cluster of colors and notes, especially for novels and comics like DC or Marvel. Even for now, when I read the comics, the dictionary is evitable for me to fully understand the comic as a whole due to the specialization in language use such as colloquialism for criminal, slang phrases only used in the U.S and so forth. That’s why even the superhero comics usually have 30 pages or less, it still takes me ages to finish them. Luckily, I am a visual learner and quite passionate about graphic novels and science fiction stuff, so the lookup thing is just a piece of cake for me. (I think :))))) )
Reading graphic novels in L2 is another great way to combine necessity with pleasure 🙂
Hi Ingrid. I particularly enjoyed the topic this week. This is because I have had a thought in my head since Week 1 and felt a little silly saying it but after going through the materials and lecture this week, I feel like I can bring it up! In Plato’s, The Phaedrus, Socrates tells Phaedrus what Thamus says to Theuth about the invention of letters: “…. for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
The irony, of course, is that I am able to read and have access to the above because it was written down and I am literate in one of the languages that it is written in.
I can read Bengali but I have never experienced reading to learn a subject in Bengali. When I tried to understand some poetry written by my great grandfather (which I could read easily), I had to keep running to my parents to ask for meanings of words, as it is written in very formal and what seems to be the equivalent of Shakespearean English. In order for me to understanding what I was reading, they also explained the context and the circumstances under which that poem was written and the symbolism of some of the words. I have yet to get my hands on a book my great grandfather translated from Persian into Bengali, but I know that when I open it, I will be able to read but not understand.
So, in light of what I read in that excerpt from The Phadreus, it makes me feel like I can make an appearance of reading something but that I may not grasp the reality of it (maybe I have to find an English translation of the original Persian book!).
Thanks, Tazin! Socrates’ warning is very topical again today. The shift to digital literacy is undoubtedly of similar magnitude as the shift from oracy to literacy was. As a culture, I think we don’t reflect enough what that shift entails for education, knowledge, and many other aspects of our society, and even our very humanity.
The statement “I can read language x” can mean many different things, as we’ll discover when we look at different types of readers and levels of literacy.
Thanks, Ingrid! This is a lovey research blog. Honestly, my English reading materials are almost from the assignments of study or the text of tests. Besides, I am still used to being pushed to read by the deadline of tasks due to my procrastination, even though I know this is not a good habit and would like to avoid this issue. btw, I am a big fan of whodunit but have not had an opportunity to look for English ones that I like.
Thanks, Han! Suspense novels are a great genre to develop good reading habits. There was a time in my life when I was addicted to reading Mary Higgins Clark thrillers – in Spanish! Reading whodunits in a language you are learning is guilt-free pleasure 🙂
Looking forward to it. I find that this unit gets more interesting every week! 🙂
🤗
I started studying English when I was in junior high school. I was excited to learn it since English was and is still the only compulsary foreign language that Indonesian students must learn in every public school. After graduated from senior high school, I continued my study for bachelor degree in English education. The most challenging part was understanding the textbooks about pedagogical knowledge and linguistics that were written in English when my English skill was not sufficient. As a result, I focused mostly on understanding the language, not on understanding the contents of the textbooks. My notebook was full with knowledge of the rules of the language and vocabulary. I was very stressful. However, I did not give up. I kept studying until I reach my current English level. Now, It feels much easier to understand any types of texts, although I still find some difficult words or metalanguages, especially in academic texts.
Academic texts are the hardest of them all. To get to the point where you can study for a higher degree through the medium of a foreign language is a huge achievement, and not celebrated near enough!
Ingrid’s text is always beautiful. I rarely had the opportunity to read English books before went to Australia. The most common English reading in my country is textbooks, but the content of textbooks is often boring, and I have no interest in reading other English books (mainly because I don’t think I can understand them). But since I came to Australia, the books I have been exposed to are all in English, which forces me to read English books. Last year, there was an event at Macquarie University. An organization that I forgot to name came to the school to sell books. The price was cheap, so I purchased several books I liked. But when I started to read, I discovered that reading English books is really difficult, especially novels. There are too many slang words in the novel that I have never seen before, and there are also many new words, I have to look up the dictionary, so it may take several days to read a chapter. Later, because of the heavy study, I didn’t continue reading. But reading is very helpful for improving language skills. If I can return to Australia, I will still insist on reading the books I bought.
Thanks, Yuan Li! Have you tried “easy readers” or bilingual texts? They can help with the tedium of having to look up words … and trashy thrillers are also great for aspiring L2 readers 😭
The use of language sometimes, instead of spreading knowledge, was used to narrow the specific type of audience as your example of John Wycliffe. I think like this too sometimes when i read very high academic research papers that are difficult to understand like why they have to write the sentence this complex. hahaha.My personal experience with reading to learn a foreign language aka English was like your latin book photo as when i studied British literature, especially poems. The good thing is I learnt many new vocabularies; the not-so-good things are those vocabularies are mostly archaic and I was too focused on vocabularies that I forgot to enjoy the beauty of the poem.
Thanks, Vichuda! Starting too difficult texts too early is really demotivating, and turns many readers off L2 reading forever. Huge challenge for language teachers to foster a love of reading in the language!
I can read and understand 3 languages, but the type of texts I read in those three languages varies a lot. English is the language that I am most fluent in and although my speaking skills are are far better than my reading in Hindi and Marathi (mostly because of lack of practice of reading and writing in those languages after school). I realize that now my reading in those languages is slow, even though it doesn’t impact my comprehension. A friend recently suggested that I read some of my favorite books in the other languages that I know. It might be an interesting thing to try out.
I was born and raised in India where the national languages are English and Hindi. I was raised in a catholic home where we communicated in English and my exposure to Hindi was quite limited. In school, Hindi was introduced in primary school where we learnt the letters and basics like colours, fruits, vegetables and so on. This only became progressively harder. It was quite hard because teachers assumed that all learners were comfortable with the use of Hindi. In fact, we had a teacher who had a Hindi only policy in the classroom. I barely learnt anything and was put into private tutoring to keep up with the rest of the class. To this day, I still read quite slowly and it takes me a while to comprehend what I am reading. I am relatively quite fluent though while speaking the language. I believe that while learning a language if not taught effectively you develop a disliking towards it – something that happened to me. Even now, I only use the language when I have no other choice because I feel I’m not as proficient as my peers who come from Hindi speaking backgrounds.
From my point of view, instinctively most people read for meaning. Of course, this is the reason we read, so there is nothing surprising about that. However, when we learn another language there can be other uses to which we can put reading. There are skilled language learners who undoubtedly read for more than just meaning when they are reading (not all the time of course, but it is a skill many have developed and use as required). They use their awareness to look at parts of the language that many not so skilled language learners may not. Through this, they come to better understandings of how the language “works”.
In my opinion, reading opens the door for every path of language learning. Even when you first start to learn your mother tongue, you still start with reading to be able to literate. Therefore, it is no doubt that reading helps to increase one’s second language proficiency. However, that can be such a seriously demanding task since reading never allows your success with just your lexical shortage. In order words, language learners generally have difficulties reading texts in another language as they have not been self-equipped with vocabularies which mainly causes a distraction for reading tasks. Nevertheless, if an appropriate reading strategy can be developed during the language learning process, challenges can be considerably diminished.
I love reading but reading in the languages other than our mother tongue is not as automatic and adequately fluent as it is in our mother language. Language is subtly attached to the culture of its users so, sometimes it is highly difficult to grab the appropriate meaning represented by some phrases, slangs, words and even sentences without an in-depth understanding of the culture. Mostly, in the case of reading in another language, our prior knowledge, and experiences along with our level of language proficiency determine our automaticity of reading. In the course of reading English texts, still, I face so many distractions caused by unknown vocabulary, unfamiliar sentence structures, etc. but its rate is significantly lower than it was in my school years.
In my early years of schooling, I used to rarely read English texts other than my coursebook. English was neither my mother language nor it had any use-value beyond the English classes. Nevertheless, I had a keen interest in this language because I would like to read the thick English books that my cousin brother used to read but I knew I was poor in English. Once, one of my English teachers suggested to me that if I would like to improve my reading competence in the English language I had to read English texts maximally. He gave me a book named ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ by an American writer Earnest Hemingway. It took almost five months to complete this book because I couldn’t read more than one page in a day; there were so many words that would obstruct repeatedly in my attempt to catch up with the plot. I used to pick up new words or expressions appearing in the course of reading this book, consult them with the dictionary, and write down them in a notebook with their meanings so that I could read them later. Interestingly, once I finished it I could say not the complete plot of it but just bits and pieces of it. I would be entirely distracted from the content of the book while I was searching for the meaning of the words and jolting them down on the notebook. In this way, I continued reading English texts. The more I learned the word-meanings, the more fluent and automatic my reading became. I started reading English newspapers especially op-ed pages which not only helped in my language improvement but also granted broader knowledge on a range of topics which would be an additional base for my further reading. Still, sometimes I face disturbances caused by the unknown vocabulary and expressions in reading texts but they are don’t negatively impact in my smooth flow with the content of the text.
H, Ingrid.
This story pushed me back to my childhood. At the age of six I saw English book for first time. I have been learning English language since twenty one years as a second language. My mother tongue is Nepali and problem to learn English was until teacher translated English into Nepali I do not understand till my intermediate level. In the first day when I got an English book I could not utter even a single letter. But, gradually I improved myself and till this date I am learning English as second language.
I always found those language learning distractions intriguing because they challenged my patience and searching skills. When I practised reading for the IELTS, I spent hours to hours looking up the new words in both dictionary and the internet. From time to time, I forgot what I was doing is reading the texts rather than looking at the language and vocabulary. I was delighted with my results. I love studying technology stuff such as computers or high-tech gadgets; therefore, I did many readings regarding this area in English. Although I was pretty confident with my English reading proficiency, I encountered many abbreviated words that make me stop reading for minutes. I believe that those distractions make reading more satisfying and attractive to me.
Anyway, I literally look up the word “obligate aerobe” when I read it in this article. I found nothing. It caught me off guard when I know its actual meaning.
Thank you for sharing such a marvellous story.
It reminds me about the first time I started to learn English. I was at the age of 15, when I received my first English book from a foreigner. For me, reading another language at that age was difficult. I used to have a habit that having a dictionary by my side to looking for the words meaning whenever I came across some new words, and it took me two weeks to finish that book although I need three days to complete the same book in Vietnamese. When I grew up a little, I started trying to guess and identify the meaning based on the context and characters’ interaction. Surprisingly, my language corpus improves sharply without depending too much on the dictionary. Now, I can understand more than 85% of every English book I read and the old English vocabulary also.
Reading is the key to learn things, but for me, reading is a tricky skill to gain. Reading in the first language is difficult for me, because I always feel sleepy when reading. Reading in the second language is much more difficult. When learning language at school, before doing the reading exercises, teachers gave us a list of new words and meaning, thus while reading, they were available for us to understand the text. However, when studying at university, teachers asked us to read more to expand knowledge about the topics we learned. With a limited range of vocabulary, when dealing with new words, I looked up in the dictionary, but when I understood the words, I forgot the main idea of the text and I had to read again. I remembered the first English book in my bookshelf was “I am gifted, so are you!”. When I read this book for the first time, I read in my first language. Then I thought why I didn’t read it in the original one. I bought it and this time, it was much easier for me to understand all the things, although there were new words, I tried to guess and recalled what I had read before in the mother tongue. Until now, I have some novels in English and reading becomes a way of entertainment in my spare time.
My mother taught me to read Greek when I was about seven years old. However, I did not further this skill whilst growing up and I am left with very basic Greek reading skills. I can read simple texts, but I would not be able to read a Greek newspaper comfortably. I take the word ‘comfortably’ as an indication of ‘real reading’. Interestingly, I can read a Japanese newspaper at a more comfortable level. I learned to read in Japanese as an adult, when I was a student in Japan. Reading in another language allows me to connect with a culture. It is like a ‘mind-switch’ to read in Greek and then in Japanese. It is quite fascinating to understand important values and ways of thinking between these cultures.
You mentioned ‘obligate aerobe’ as having Latin root words. I, too make connections between Greek root words. In particular this has been helpful for this subject, orthography, morphemes, ideograph, semasiography are Greek-based words.
Meanings can also get lost amongst languages. I, too used to mark my foreign text with vocabulary meanings and become distant form the context. I realise how much of my own life experiences I would bring to the reading and at times completely misinterpret information. This is what children must do as well. As educators we need to be mindful that children bring to the reading process their experiences of life and language. As explained by the “Matthew effect” rich oral input is critical to early reading and can be indicators of reading success.
After reading your explanation of how reading competency is facilitated by early literacy education, I had come to realise that was true in my case. I am literate in my mother tongue, Vietnamese, from schooling trainings, which, as a result, has tremendously assisted my understanding of the schooling content later in life. The process was smooth without minimal obstacles. In contrast, when I started to read novels in English at tertiary level, I had encountered extremely difficulties, especially with advanced and unfamiliar words. However, as I wanted to know what the story ending was, I had skipped these words and proceeded to next pages. Eventually, I could still grab around 70% of what the story was about, nevertheless, I had to re-read the book to focus on elaborating all the details that I missed. Thus, a vast amount of effort was usually required to be put into reading in a second language.
I have been learning English from the young age. However, i still have difficulties in reading English articles. The most obvious problem is that when i was reading and met new words, i just look up in the dictionary and ignore the reading itself. It is the same as Ingrid said in this article:” All these considerations took me away from the content of the text and made me focus on the language itself.” When i finished checking meanings of words, i forget what i had read. It was so terrible and i felt frustrated when it happened. Using another language to read is difficult for me, but with the progress of learning, now i have found the way which is suitable for me. Scanning first is important for me using another language to read, then in the process of reading, if i have new vocabularies, i ignore and try my best to guess the meaning according to the context. The benefit is that when i finish reading the whole article, the main idea is clearly. Then analysing vocabularies or grammar, expressions become easier in the condition of obtaining the main idea. It is obvious that when i read more English articles, reading skills are improved significantly, and vocabularies, grammar and cultural background are also expanded for further study.
My mother tongue is Spanish, but I have been learning English since early childhood and now consider it almost a native language. However, I still recall when I was about to finish high school and was contemplating going to study abroad (UK), and how concerned I was about my “academic” English proficiency.
I was always reminded as a child that to be successful in any professional arena I had to be “academically” literate in English (not an easy endeavour when is not your mother tongue. I see now that this was a much more difficult task for me than for those who grew up listening to English in their households. This poses the question of whether the advent of English as the international academic language works to systematically disadvantage non-native speakers whom did not get the chance to develop the automaticity of reading English since early childhood.
Sometimes I wonder if my passion for (or, rather, obsession with) English is somewhat unhealthy and abnormal. My reading escapade might be a bit different from most people in that as soon as I reached a decent competence in English around high school, I devoured everything I could find in this language and avoided texts in my mother tongue like the plague whenever possible. However, at the time I simply read mostly news and grammar and vocabulary books specifically designed for English learners. As I gained greater proficiency in the language and momentum for reading during my undergraduate years, I set out to conquer my erstwhile fear of tomes of novels, which I had hardly ever read even in Vietnamese. I reluctantly picked up the first book in the Harry Potter series, which turned out to an astonishingly quick and gripping read. I was off to such a good start that I couldn’t wait to go on to the next book. The “learner” side of me, however, harnessed that urge and pressured me into re-reading to look up less familiar words (which, in the first time, I simply guessed). The second read was a real chore as each dictionary consultation painfully slowed down my reading, yet I ploughed on thinking this would help me become a more skilled reader later on. Unsurprisingly, this strenuous process of book “enjoyment” only lasted a few books as I not only got fed up with it but also mustered enough confidence to read without the intrusive lexical assistant.
I reckon that reading to learn in another language is very important topic for foreign language learners, especially for us intending to become qualified linguists. I have studied English for many years, but I still have struggled to read through and get the precise meaning of reading materials. Like other languages, English is rich in words and unknown words are encountered while I am reading and in my opinion, verbs and phrasal verbs are the most difficult part of Englich lexicon. Commonly-used words tend to express several meanings and sometimes I am puzzled that they convey the meaning I have known or not. For instance, the word, get can convey a variety of meanings and in that case understanting context to full extent is vital. Morevover, I have known the meaning of words in general, but there is nuance (slight difference of words) within that word. While I was commenting on this story, I found out that I should focus on English words and collocations in the further in order to become a more professional reader.
Hi, Ingrid.
Thank you for your interesting sharing. Actually, for me, the biggest obstacle to reading another language is new words and phrases. In the early period of reading another language, I always interrupted by these unfamiliar words or phrases because I would stop reading and look up the dictionary. I spend more time on the meaning of unknown words rather than the understanding of the whole paragraph. Because of the ILETS test, it is not enough time for me to understand each word or phrases. Guessing the meaning becomes the universal way for me to read another language in a short time. I realise that the more I practise guessing the words the more accurate I get. So, I usually do not interrupt the reading of a text but try to understand it by guessing as many words as possible without affecting comprehension. After reading the text, looking up the dictionary to get the exact meaning of new words.
I have been learning English as a second language for more than 17 years. Reading is an important skill in learning English. In order to improve my reading skill, I spent a lot of time learning grammar and vocabulary. This way of learning English reading skills is common in China. I found that I learned a lot of vocabulary and I knew the grammar of English but my English reading skills were still not very good. I read very slowly. At the same time, I knew every word in the sentences but I cannot understand the meanings of the sentences. Because the most important difference between English and Chinese is that English is a high context language while Chinese is the opposite. English express meanings through sentences while Chinese express meanings through words. Therefore, when we are learning a foreign language, we not only need to pay attention to the positive impacts of the language, we but also need to pay attention to the negative impacts of the language.
Hello Ingrid and everyone!
I looked at your pictures, and I was so surprised because I circle and highlight my books as well. I always stop reading when I find some interesting vocabularies and new sentence structures. Even though it is tough, reading is a skill that I still have to improve. My reading in second or third languages becomes my priority nowadays. I have to admit that at the very beginning stage when I started reading in other languages was very difficult and challenging. I do agree at the point that I probably do better in my own language, but there always have a lot of benefits of reading in other languages. I stopped reading books in my mother tongue a while ago, and I found that reading in other languages is more fun and enjoyable. The books originally are more charming in their own version. Once I read Harry Potter in Thai version, but I wanted to challenge myself, so I bought the English version and tried to read it again. I found that there was something missing in Thai version, and it was more fun. I didn’t mean my version was not good, but I believe it has something hidden in the original one. The thing that the writer really wanted to say, and that is something the translator could not imitate or translate to my language. Also, one benefit of reading in other language is I don’t need to wait until the translated version comes out. I reached the original version of Harry Potter first, and I enjoyed it first before other people could. I appreciate the fact that I have ability to reach these books in other languages because it is exactly like an access to knowledge and enjoyment.
Reading has long been a great joy and pastime for me since I was a little kid. However, when it comes to reading in another language, which is English in my case, I still remembered facing great struggle when reading academic passages or English novels. In the beginning, I found reading short paragraphs in my English textbook a piece of cake because they usually contained simple structure. However, when I first took up reading English newspapers or novels, it was really challenging as I often lost in the middle of the paragraph due to the complexities of structures and vocabulary. Later, I decided to take step by step in my reading as I aimed to read to learn English (vocabulary and grammar). I used to use a big, thick Oxford dictionary and notebooks while reading. I remember using it too much that its pages began to fall off every single time I turned them. Gradually, I could feel that my reading ability improved greatly in terms of speed and I could see that I no longer lost in the distractions of looking up new words in the dictionary. Rather, I tried to guess the general meaning of such words and only resorted to the dictionary when it was too difficult.
At the moment, I am still reading to learn. I read to enlarge my general knowledge about the surround world as well as to build my English.
I think that everyone should consider reading as a hobby rather than an academic duty.
Your experience is so interesting. I will share you my experience when learning reading in other language. When I was a child, I always look up new words as I read texts in English. Sometimes, the text were so short; however, it took me much time to look up dictionary and understand meaning of vocabulary and then comprehend the context what the text was talking about. But when I entered the university, I read a lot because my major was Interpreting and Translating. At that time, there were a large number of new words that I had never met before; however, I seldom look up the meaning in the dictionary. Because the texts were very long, I had no time to look up and I just based on the context to guess the meaning of those words. Especially, when I study to translate the English literature, it was really hard to understand the meaning from English into Vietnamese. In English literature, there are numerous ancient words that are difficult to translate into Vietnamese. Even occasionally, I stayed up late to read and look for the appropriate meanings for context of a poem or a text, I still got bad marks. On a daily basics, i study more vocabulary to broaden my horizon of knowledge and acquire a fast speed in reading.
Hi everyone,
Although I have learned English from an early age and I have been keeping to attain the new vocabulary, English reading is still a huge challenge for me. Just like Ingrid mentioned that looking up the new phrases distracts the concentration on gaining new information from the reading. However, I have developed my own way to do the reading. I try to skim the whole reading first to get an overview before starting the intensive reading. During reading in details, I would guess the meaning of the words in the context and I would ignore the words that I might not able to guess. If the words appear in the reading many times which would influence my understanding of the reading, I would write them down first and then look them up after the first intensive reading. Then I would read the reading again to enhance my understanding of the content.
Thank you for sharing your wonderful experience for us. Reading in another language has always been a challenge to me. At first, I was introduced to reading Japanese by learning the kata-kana style at home. However, I was never taught how to read the Kanji characters from my parents. My parents thought that learning Kanji characters will interfere with my English education. Nevertheless, I still learnt how to read these Kanji characters by reading Japanese manga.
Uniquely, a lot of the Japanese manga books that I read had a system called Okuri-gana. This system allows the reader to learn how to read the Kanji character by adding kata-kana letters as a dubbing next to it. Using this system, I self-taught most of the kanji characters by using such a system. The more I think about my experience, I wonder if such a system exists in other countries. Although this system requires a certain level of vocabulary, I think this system created is very clever and helpful to many Japanese language learners. Now, I can read most of the Japanese characters but I am still slowly learning more kanji through novels. Kanji is a endless challenge because there is so many of them.
As a Chinese learner of English, I am not able to connect any English words or part of words with any Latin words when reading because Chinese and English or Latin belong to different language family. however, I can use my own strategy to remember vocabulary or understand maning when I read in English. For example, the prefix in- roughly means being covered or contained while the prefix ex- indicates not being covered or contained. In this way, I can easily understand the meaning of words such as internal, include, external and exclude. When i encounter words with prefixes in- oa ex-, I can imagine the general meaning in the context that I read, which helps me a lot comprehend the ideas of a sentence or a paragraph. As a result, reading is not just a thing about learning the idea but can be more about how to learn new words and summarize the rules and apply it in next time reading. The more you read, the more rules you get, the more you learn how to learn efficiently.
In my country, most students start to learn English in primary school, and they learn vocabulary firstly, then reading and listening. As a foreign language, it is almost impossible for students to memorize all vocabulary, so when we read English readings, we always look up new words in a dictionary. Now, I get used to learn new words or expressions from books, movies and lyrics. Learning from reading helps me to recall the article that I firstly met that word, so I can memorize more sentences connected with the word in the article. This is a more interesting way to learn new language than just in classroom.
Several years ago, while I was rambling in a large bookstore in Ho Chi Minh city, I bumped into a Japanese cartoon which I used to read the Vietnamese version of it. With my curiosity, I turn a couple of pages of the anime comic and have a quick look at it. Since that moment, I spontaneously want to understand those Japanese characters, partly because Japanese characters are completely different from what I have learnt about Vietnamese alphabet, and English alphabet as well, whose writing are originally from Latin. Then I and my friend enrolled a basic Japanese course and a new horizon of language opens to our eyes. Most striking thing is I realized even Japanese system of words also contains loan vocabularies, sometimes they are presented in another nearly similar form of pronunciation. But in general, those words still have the same root or a part of it has the same root with another word originated from other languages. Another case, while I was assigned to read an English story whose plot is from Chinese, I came up with the word ‘kowtow’ and this word has the same pronunciation with its Chinese origin. These encounters help me to realize a part of the work of linguistics towards communities, that is they are always finding something new about linguistics and evaluate shortcomings of a certain alphabet as well as managing to fill in those constant gaps.
Last semester, when I took the unit APPL902 – Research Methodology (I think), I was introduced two terms: positive cross-linguistic transfer and negative cross-linguistic transfer. The former occurs when I find similarities between my first and target languages then I can apply rules/structures from my source language to the second one. Unfortunately, my mother tongue, Vietnamese, share no similarities with my target language – English since they are two different language families.
However, during my French learning process, I realized that French and English are similar to some extent. I mean some English lexicons are loanwords or borrowed from French. Most of them are big words, sounding academic and old-fashioned, and mostly found in scholarly writing to which I was frequently exposed at university. And yeah, this relation helped me alot in comprehending new English vocabulary.
Of course, this relation is not always useful. I still look up new words in a dictionary or attempt to guess their meaning based on contextual clues. I prefer guessing but it’s such a hard-to-acquire skills. I often locate new words in the whole sentence to determine its part of speech, then looking at other content words to predict its possible meaning. It’s interesting but demanding. If I fail to guess its meaning, yes, then I have no choice but looking it up. Then I try to learn/mesmorize that word but placing it into a phrase. That’s the way I cope with new vocabulary when reading in English.
I have had the habit of reading since I was a child. The reason for getting into this habit is that I have been myopia since childhood, and my parents have forbidden me to watch TV. Therefore, I use it in my spare time to make myself find fun in reading. The speed of learning a language in reading is very fast. Because I like reading, my Chinese scores from the beginning of elementary school were among the best in the class. I graduated from high school and entered the university to study Chinese language and literature. This kind of experience made me learn from my second language: English, and I also tried to start with reading. I like to read novels, so I bought a book called “A Letter from a Strange Woman.” The words in this book are relatively simple, and the plot is fascinating, making me feel a lot of fun while reading. Since then, I have also seen some simple English novels. While reading books, I also like to watch English movies. Looking at English subtitles, there is also a feeling of reading novels. Jane Eyre is a work that I have read both books and movies. Combining images and text has left a very deep impression on my heart.
Hi Ingrid, thank you for sharing your story.
I absolutely know the feeling like “All these considerations took me away from the content of the text and made me focus on the language itself.” that you mentioned in this article. It’s frustrating having to stop reading and check words in a dictionary.
Frankly speaking, I have rarely done much readings in English before. In the past, I majored in Japanese and had been living & working in Japan. As all you know, Japan, like China, uses a large amount of Chinese characters (of course, I also made effort to memorize Kana in Japanese), so my reading in Japanese (my second language) is relatively smooth.
However, for a non-native English learner, the ability of English reading largely depends on vocabulary size. If they do not reach a high level of vocabulary, like I mentioned, they have to stop to check the words, which will affect the fluency of reading and efficient understanding of the text.
Thanks Ingrid for sharing this amazing post. During my school years, I rarely spent time on reading English books so my reading skill was really bad. Some short paragraphs in textbooks took me longer time than my classmates as I usually thought in my mother tongue words by words which definitely slowed down my reading speed. Years later, I forced myself to improve my weakness by reading short news or stories with easy vocabs. Then I learned how to guess the meanings within its context which helped stop the bad habit of translating into my first language while reading English. I once heard that if you see a word 7 times, then you will know its meaning without looking up in a dictionary. So, yes, reading would help you a lot in learning another language.
Hi everyone,
In my country, we started learning English as foreign language from secondary school at age of 13. Reading activities at secondary and high school were very simple to me because my teacher just told us to look for the key words in the question and match with those in the passage, then copy the whole sentence as the answer. This approach only requires scanning skill and not fully developed reading comprehension skill. However, in my postgraduate, when I started to read I need to understand every word and this is where I faced with trouble. I have difficulties to read the content of the course reading and understand the meaning of it from the first time. Most of the time I need to translate many words and phrase to better understand the text as a whole. I agree that international students would need to learn to read along with read to learn, and sometimes our previous English learning experience didn’t give us a good starting point for the postgraduate journey.
Firstly, this is a very good read! I can totally relate to your experience in trying to understand the phrase “obligate aerobe”. It’s like when I came across words that I’d not known or seen before, like “crematorium” – but I could then break it down to “cremat(e)” and “torium” which I could link to other words I’d known like “cremate” (that has to do with burning dead bodies) and “auditorium” (a place where listening activities happen), so I could guess that a ‘crematorium’ is a place where the activity of ‘burning dead bodies’ happens. I think our prior knowledge does help us a lot in reading, especially when we make an attempt to notice and to deduce the meaning of a new word.
I can say for myself that I’m an efficient reader, although a very lazy one. I’m relatively lazy to start reading, but once I’ve started, I can finish very quickly. In the past, I would spend hours to look up the meanings of any new words I encountered (which kind of demotivated my reading practice), but at one point I realised that it just wouldn’t work, because if I don’t use them, I will just forget their meanings. Later on, (partially because I got too lazy to look the words up since a dictionary might not always come in handy!) I developed a habit to notice the new words; and when I’m exposed to the same words several times, I can recognise their spelling and will remember their meanings. It’s like there’s a mini-corpus of those words in my head that would collect several (if not all) situations where the words are used. I also do the same for grammar. But I can say that, the way I learn and collect all this knowledge has been more through song lyrics and movie subtitles more than from books.
I was also an eager learner of Mandarin, so I usually watched Chinese movies with dual subtitles (Mandarin & either English or my first language Vietnamese) so I can link the characters to the sounds, guess their meanings from the context (and also from the character itself – as a Chinese character usually contains the phonic and the semantic elements). Therefore, I think whatever kind of reading it is, we can always learn a lot from it.
I found this post particularly interesting as the page notations remind me of my experiences studying French during my first few years at university. I would annotate all over the pages of a book called ‘Shérazade’ in order to connect with the deeper meaning of the words and ideas written on the pages. It was a great way for me to understand not only new words, but to understand context and how these words were used to apply greater meaning in the sentence or create greater effect on the reader/audience. This experience was wonderful to say the least.
However, during the past five years I have been learning the Tongan language. My partner (Tekina-I-Moana) is of Tongan descent, and as a student of linguistics I have always felt it important to immerse myself, not only in his culture, but in his language. The task of reading to learn is almost impossible in this situation, partly due to the lack of Tongan texts available. Today, I asked Tekina if he could find me a book that I could read in order to enhance my knowledge of the Tongan language vocabulary. He handed me a copy of the ‘Ko e Tohitapu Katoa’, which is an old leather-bound copy of the Tongan Holy Bible. Given that I am extremely familiar with the English bible, I am interested to see if this assists my reading ability and comprehension of Tongan vocabulary in this text. I am also interested to compare my experiences with reading to learn between languages.
I really love the part “The whole point of learning to read is ultimately reading to learn.” It is a really true fact that at first when we are not mastering a language, we focus more on the language while reading. But when we can use it smoothly, we read just for the information and don’t care much about the language used. And the whole point of learning a language is to get connected with the knowledge written by that language.
Learning to read in a foreign language in my experience is much easier than to speak the language. Because I can spend hours reading and gaining knowledge at the same time, meanwhile, given the same amount of time spent on practice speaking, I can’t get to the level of native speakers. It is quite surprising to look back at the day that I had to highlight almost every word in a short simple paragraph to learn the meanings of them, while, today I can read hips of thick books written in English!
Personally, I had the opportunity to read to learn in Spanish when I undertook a year in a Chilean university. In my experience, context of situation plays a major role in giving words their meaning. As a foreigner, I was not up to date with the culture’s shared and agreed upon meanings to many words or ways of expression. What I believed to be correct also had many meanings depending on the context. Another obstacle I encountered was the simultaneous automatic internal translation process (which is natural to all L2 learners) that kept getting in the way. Not until approx. 6 months into the academic year, did I shed this burden and truly unshackled my mind from English’s unnecessary interference. In other words, there is a point in language acquisition where one needs to begin thinking like a local and with it comes the way the world is observed, classified and perceived in the L2 culture.
Hi Ingrid,
Thank you for your motivational sharing !
With respect to my reading to learn in another language- English, I started to read English texts to learn English when I was at the secondary school. For me, at that time ,I felt demotivated to read and write because sitting for a long time and read or write is boring and meaningfulless , so I preferred and spent most of my time to practice listening and speaking, instead.
However, the older I grew, the more written texts that I had to be engaged with. I could be seen as inevitable things that I had to love and to follow in order to be as a member in my communities. Gradually, I develop my literacy in English through reading books, blogs, news in English. Then, as I started to do the master degree here , I must further develop it , yet it is challenging and painful at the first several times because the rhetorical resources in the materials were extremely different from my English. Nonetheless, The more I read in English , the more proficient I am in many aspects such as skimming and scanning skills, reading fluency , guessing meanings and other sub-skills. in short, learning by reading is the most effective way to enrich my knowledge.
Thank you, Ingrid, for yet another amazing read. I do not have much experience with reading to learn in another language. So I am very curious about the thought process that occurs whilst simultaneously learning the content and trying to attach the meanings to the words. Perhaps my closest experience to reading to learn in another language is browsing Arabic newspapers. Arabic is a complex language whereby there are diacritic marks that are attached to the letters to achieve different sounds thus different meanings. So while I’m reading, my eyes scan the writing for the diacritic marks whilst trying to comprehend the content. It can be a real struggle sometimes when the clauses are lengthy! Although Arabic is my second language, I am yet to achieve automaticity since I’m not a proficient Arabic reader!
I am one of the examples that students read to learn in English. In my country, Taiwan, most children develop language skills in listening and reading. I guess it may be caused by our learning strategies in learning Mandarin words – listen and read to understand and acquire the words. However, I found myself reading slower than my other classmates as a high school student. I had a fully same feeling with Ingrid when I read “the aim of literacy in higher education is making us more efficient learner”, and this was also my weak point in studying which I had to make extra effort to be an efficient reader as an international student here. Although it is quite challenging to me, I still hope I can keep my interests while I learn how to read effectively.
Reading law to become a lawyer is an entirely unique discourse. It poses significant challenges for any good reader who may be already skilled in their first language. The relevance of legal reading and academic performance should never underestimated when learning law.
As Dewitz (1995:657) asserts, “It is often argued that reading is reading, meaning that once one has acquired good reading skills any text is equally accessible. A significant amount of research now exists to refute that claim…each genre we read requires the use of special knowledge plus the tools or strategies to use that knowledge.”
I started reading law (a legal term for students studying law at law school) in 2005. It was to be my second university degree. Although Australia promotes the Plain English movement of reading and writing law the use of the Latin language is threaded in much of the legal terminology as well as the legal concepts of current Australian law. Instead of being intimidated by having to learn Latin as well as learn a new genre such as law, I was excited. Even the French language was included as well as German. Multiple laws connecting directly to Australian law were also entwined into the readings.
Finally, I could pierce into an already legally austere world where elitism reigned supreme. If I could learn the language of law then I would be equipped for the remainder of my life to understand Contracts, Torts, the Australian Constitution, Property Law, Equity and Trusts, Criminal Law, Intellectual Property Law, Public International Law, Family Law, Information Technology Law, Employment Law, Military Law, Succession Law and so on.
The knowledge would empower my life but it would also be the equivalent to becoming a black-belt martial arts expert in the language of law. In other words, I would feel completely protected because the knowledge would no longer be unknown nor shrouded in mystery.
The first step was buying a legal dictionary. Some of the most important Latin terms had to be immediately read and remembered. Important Latin terms such as Stare decisis (Latin for “precedent”), Affidavit (Latin for “he/she has sworn”), Bona fide (Latin for “good faith”), Caveat (Latin for “beware”) and Obiter dicta (Latin for “said in passing). All of these Latin terms and numerous others had to be legally applied to case readings and then to legal assignments. Precise reading had to be learned. Unmistakable memory skills attached to legislation, cases and books had to be applied for all the examinations.
Application of law is only successful when the reading of law is accomplished. Understanding how to read and analyze footnotes was also imperative. The law books were over 1,000 pages and sometimes more, and all of them contained hundreds of footnotes that had to be read simultaneously. This was a time consuming task.
As I was working full-time as well as working two part-time jobs I had to use my reading time wisely. I read everyday on the trains, during the brief lunch breaks, at home and before going to bed. I read, read, read and I thought I would never stop. After six years of endless reading the time had come to complete the law degree. Then it was more reading after graduation as the next step was to complete the GDLP (Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice). Another two and a half years of more reading. Finally, eight and a half years of reading law had ended.
Sometimes I walk into my home office and stare at my law books with fondness. All the law books are “words that are tools for lawyers, who must be able to forge words into consequential discourse” (Deegan, 1995:157).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
Wikipedia expands vis-a-vis the Matthew Effect and its link to Christ’s apostle who was a despised tax collector for the Roman empire:
“The concept is presented again in Matthew outside of a parable during Christ’s explanation to his disciples of the purpose of parables:
And he (sic) [questionable pronominal usage concerning case] answered them, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.’
If one cites only the closing sentence, without apprehending the penultimate or the context, one perchance concludes that ‘to him who has’ is an allusion on Jesus’ part to the wealthy or to those who love money.
Given Ingrid’s allusion to linguistic justice, is it not most interesting that ‘use it or lose it’ in language acquisition interconnects well with ethics?
May yours be abundance, over abundance and super abundance!
LOL. Paul (not the apostle)
After reading Ingrid’s article and some students’ comments, I really feel like I could be one of the actors in those situation. First of all, I might have learned English as my foreign language since young however my effective and profound English learning has only been started, as I can say, for the past six years when, at the same time, I started my bachelor. Less exposure of the language in my early life leads to some difficulty in understanding and properly occupying the language which then halts me to achieve quicker automaticity, especially, when reading to learn in English. Moreover, in this country where English is predominant and is the pivotal tool throughout academic process, my task is far away harder. However, even though my “Matthew Effect” might have never happened, I can still hold the saying that “it is better late than never”.
Thank you for sharing your experience with reading to learn in Latin. After I
entered the university, I found that reading to learn was not easy for me as I cannot automatically learn new content from the texts. Although I have got basic English grammatical knowledge and familiarized many vocabularies, I cannot quickly identify the meaning of sentences combined by complex words chunks. When I read some advanced articles written by professional scholars, I need to translate the meaning of unknown words into Chinese, otherwise I cannot contextually understand the main ideas of texts. I would try to decode the meaning of words they represent and the main ideas of each text for achieving automaticity in reading to learn in English.
Reading this blog and the associated question on learning to read in a L2 actually made me reflect on my learning to read in L1 in order to somehow try and articulate, in my own mind, my experiences with learning to read Spanish as an L2. Actually, Spanish seemed a breeze in comparison to my L1 language of English if I really think about it. The subjects I did best in in high school – English and History – were also subtly difficult as I had difficulty with spelling and some letter shape (b and d) in primary school. Even when I went for the interview with my CELTA some 19 years ago, the interviewer asked if I was dyslexic! Anyway, I overcame these issues in primary school and as Spanish is so phonetic and logical in my mind compared to English, I generally had no problems. Perhaps it’s an over simplification but my memories of learning to read in my L2 are much better than my L1!
Reading to learn in another language, specifically English, has been an idea that I strongly advocate and promote to my students. As there are not many good translators in my country, Vietnam, we do not have an access to an enormous amount of information and knowledge that is written in other languages. On the other hand, the popularity of English language has made it is possible that most of the valuable materials be either written or translated into this language. I always tell my students that English could be an extremely useful tool that helps them approach information in the areas of their interests.
Nevertheless, I am aware of the difficulties of people who want to access to the knowledge but are restricted by their language proficiency. I have a student who loves literature, but when she reads English novels, she could not feel the excitement that she has when she read in her mother tongue due to her limited language ability. What I told her was that she would need to be better at English to enjoy the books, but she could start with reading a book that: first, not too difficult for her, and second, she had already read in her first language and loved.
From my experience, reading to learn in another language would only be much easier if the reader has reached a certain level in that language which allows him or her to understand the majority of the text and to guess the meanings of unknown words from the context. If the reader’s level is lower than that, a great amount of motivation, hard work, and perseverance would be needed.
Three somewhat disparate thoughts that came to me while reading Ingrid’s post this week:
On marginalia – I found the photo of the penciled handwriting from Ingrid’s copy of Gallic War to be quite fascinating. For some reason, I’ve never been one to annotate the pages of a book: when ‘actively’ reading to learn (as opposed to reading for pleasure) I take handwritten notes on a notepad, noting unfamiliar terms and definitions there. My husband’s books, however, are filled with pencil marginalia, and I love it that when I pick up one of this books (especially one that he might have read decades ago) I can see through his jottings the sorts of conversations he might have had with himself while reading it. I like this idea that we have conversations with ourselves when reading, finding the best ways to allow us to make the best meaning from the text.
On discourse – what jumped out at me when reading about the language of learning and the ‘Matthew Effect’ is the multiple ways the learner might encounter barriers to their learning. Learners who aren’t fluent in the language of learning—aren’t familiar with the institutional discourses of a specific educational system, whether due to socioeconomic or culturally diverse backgrounds–are disadvantaged in their efforts to access that learning successfully. Then, if that language of learning is in English, and English is not their first language, another barrier to learning success is introduced. If a learner was to also have some kind of an accessibility issue due to a disability, the barriers increase again. And so on. I guess I have always felt learning itself to be a privilege, but need to also recognize that the ability to learn is also a privilege and perpetuates privilege. While I do not speak a language other than English, but I am lucky to speak the language of knowledge and learning.
On encountering unfamiliar words – I love words that are not translatable into English. I have the tattoo of the Welsh word hiraeth, for example, as I relate to its meaning (roughly translatable to a longing, nostalgia or grief for a home that one cannot return to or maybe never even existed). I also have a tattoo of the Maori word whanau, written in my brother’s handwriting, as a nod to my Kiwi heritage and family. In the case of whanau (which roughly refers to the idea of extended family, but also in the sense of family ties to a particular geographical and political space), the kinship systems that are characteristic of Polynesian cultures means that it’s a word that doesn’t quite translate into English, which has a different idea of family.
As a student from the United States, mastery of the English language is not optional, and while this skill has been immeasurably pivotal to my tertiary education, it did come equipped with a handicap. Especially, for someone pursuing a degree in linguistics. If I had not made the personal decision to live and teach abroad I would not have had the opportunity to develop linguistic and cultural fluency in other languages. While second language acquisition is generally enforced among secondary school curriculums in the United States, fluency or real-life application of a second language is hardly demanded of students. Academically speaking, I was required to take two years of Spanish, although I decided while in high school to take an optional 3rd year of Spanish because I enjoyed the experience, and because I lived in a predominantly Hispanic area at the time, I felt strongly that Spanish could be useful. The first two years focused on basic terminology, grammar, and vocabulary and by my third year, I naively, felt I would be prepared for a more intermediate level of Spanish. I was very unprepared. Though my friends would speak to each other in Spanish regularly, their native tongue, I lacked the fluency and familiarity with the vernacular to follow. By the end of my third year, I was agonizingly frustrated with myself for not gaining a higher level of fluency with the language, and how after a short time I seemed to forget most of the instruction. It was not until I lived in Indonesia, a few years later, did I understand that I lacked something pivotal to the development of language fluency. I lacked the cultural integration, something pivotal to language development, needed to learn it properly. In Indonesia, I learned more Bahasa Indonesia in two months, than I had learned in two years in Spanish class, translating vocabulary words and practicing conjugation. This was a testament to how difficult it must be for students who lack the cultural integration and exposure to English in a natural setting, to move to a new country where English is the predominant language used in the social and academic process, and be expected to not only master the language, but to understand and use English, in accordance to the demands of the cultural and social environment in which it was developed in.
I read this post relating myself to you in terms of the experience of reading in another language. As my answer to your last question, even though I’d say I am quite literate in English, I still encounter unfamiliar words while studying. I first guess the meaning of the words by morphemes or contexts, as you did. I believe this is the best way to become able to read in another language and learn though reading. However, as a language teacher, although teaching strategies to improve literacy is important, your word ‘literacy learning is no longer an aim in itself’ reminded me of the meaning of teaching to read.
I started learning English as my second language since I was in Year 6. Reading at that time wasn’t an easy task for me; it took time to read and do silent translation in my brain to understand. When I became more advanced in English, I really enjoy reading. There are many beautiful words and expressions to learn. What I really like about English is that there are many words/phrases which convey the meanings that my first language would take a long phrase or sentence to express (eg. ‘On the move’). I also enjoy reading English texts because I can guess the meanings based on the word roots, prefixes and suffixes. Overall, by reading, we can learn a lot.
I have been studying Japanese for about four years and have been living in Japan for three years, during this time my reading ability has been advancing steadily, as it is quite necessary to function in day-to-day life. I am at a stage in my reading where unless it is quite an advanced text on a specific topic, I can probably read it comfortably. But I’ve never sat down and read an educational text in Japanese, rather, to foster motivation I try to read more light-hearted materials of interest to me, like fictional manga and short stories. In part, because they are more oriented to younger viewers so they are easier to read, and also because the child in me still enjoys them. I am currently reading 魔女の宅急便 (roughly translated: home delivery service of a witch), and am enjoying it.
I can probably read and quickly recognize around 1400-1500 kanji (Chinese script of logographic morphemes used in Japanese reading and writing) which is ok for more basic texts, but if i read a more advanced, educational text, then I probably cannot read it quickly as I will be bogged down by characters I don’t understand or haven’t seen for a long time, that I need to either guess from context or look up. So instead of reading for context the occasion becomes more of a Japanese study session. However, I would love to one day be able to achieve automaticity in reading advanced Japanese texts, and be able to comfortably ‘read to learn’ in a language other than English.
Correction: Line 13 – Instead of reading for ‘content’ the occasion becomes more of a Japanese study session.
I appreciate how fortunate I am to be able to read to learn not only in one but two languages. I believe it gives one arguably one of the best advantages in this time of the mankind when we are under constant influence of information coming from left, right and centre. How does one differentiate between the piece of information that is valuable, the one that should be dismissed or the one that is a complete lie and readers should be aware of it and possibly act against it? This is the reason why I think bilingualism or multilingualism come very handy. Readers don’t have to rely on one source of information but cross-check in other languages because sometimes important bits of information get lost in translation. And we can only argue if it’s intentional!
Besides that, I very much enjoy that I can plunge into foreign literature that opens doors I’ve never dreamed of.
The issue of language justice raised in Ingrid’s closing comment (and btw also in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 2) mirrors the aims of the Esperanto movement. A neutral, auxiliary, international language (an auxlang), preferably free of any colonial baggage and justly devised for all alike, negates the unfair advantages innate to native speakers of imperial languages like English. “The Latin of the people” is a name often given to Esperanto by Europeans for denoting its egalitarianism.
Minor typo, Ingrid:’By the 19th century, these reform efforts hard largely been successful’
Thanks, Paul, for the close read! Corrected now 🙂
Ingrid’s text is as usual full of reflective insights, but I think there are risks in drawing broad conclusions, as if they are universally true. For instance to state that ‘English is fast becoming the predominant language of higher education’ is open to misinterpretation. In which parts of the world is this the case? What is happening in some parts of continental Europe is that higher education is becoming bilingual, a combination of academic literacy in a national language and English. It is official government policy in the five Nordic countries (Scandinavia and Finland) that there should be a healthy balance of this kind, so as to meet local and more international needs. At undergraduate level throughout continental Europe (including Germany, Ingrid’s country of origin) it is primarily the national language that is the medium of learning. Additive language language use in higher education is desirable.
I react partly because there are forces, mainly in the UK and USA, that are strengthening English-medium learning in state education in former colonies. The mushrooming of ‘international’ schools is another symptom of elites buying into a monolingual English-medium worldview. English-medium higher education in former colonies still functions in a subtractive way that fails to strengthen local languages. It is important therefore not to generalize in ways that can support an excessive focus on English. There is a substantial literature on many of these language policy issues, for instance the book that I co-edited with scholars from Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines: Bunce, Pauline, Robert Phillipson, Vaughan Rapatahana, and Ruanni. F. Tupas (eds) 2016. Why English? Confronting the Hydra. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
I endorse Ingrid’s focus on the importance of Latin. It was a subject in my own schooling in the UK from age 8 to 15. Learning it cannot fail to make one aware of variations of sentence structure, morphology, semantics, and syntax, which translation into and from the language can lead to proficiency in generating. This provided a useful foundation for the learning of modern foreign languages later, French and German in my schooling, and several languages since then. Unfortunately the communicative language learning paradigm made a more or less total break with ‘grammar and translation’ traditions, rather than producing a synthesis of approaches. The teaching materials of my grandchildren learning English and French in Denmark and Sweden are in fact a good blend of communicative activities that can appeal to young people with metalinguistic knowledge, lexical translation, and consciousness-raising and about form and learning strategies. This may explain in part why foreign language learning in this part of Europe is more effective than in many countries.