Craig Dodge Taiwan

Founded in 1966, RIF (Reading is Fundamental) is the oldest and largest children's and family nonprofit literacy organization in the United States. RIF's highest priority is reaching underserved children from birth to age 8. Through community volunteers in every state and U.S. territory, RIF provided 4.4 million children with 15 million new, free books and literacy resources last year. All RIF programs combine three essential elements to foster children's literacy: reading motivation, family and community involvement, and the excitement of choosing free books to keep.

It seems that the only time I was reading for pleasure, until recently, was on my flights back and forth between Taiwan and the US. After all, what else can you do when you are stuck on an airplane for 12-15 hours? How relaxing and enjoyable that was, though.

Reading is more than just an enjoyable, relaxing way to pass some time, though. The better your reading and writing skills are, the more you will learn in school, which might allow you to get better jobs. Reading will broaden not only your vocabulary, but also your horizons. You will learn so much about different ideas, different places and different cultures.  Reading is fundamental!

What got me thinking about reading was not just my recently renewed joy of spending time with a good book or about the importance of literacy, but also my concern with how my EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students can enhance their English ability. Spending an hour or 2 a week in an English class is not going to result in much improvement. Additionally,  text books can only take you so far and may not really be interesting to you. I'm often asked by students for advice on other ways besides our classes to improve their English ability, and there is not a much better way than to read.

As I wrote in a previous post, I believe that seeing and hearing a language in action is the natural, most effective way to learn it. It's how we learned our native language,  and in my own foreign language learning experience I've found it to be essential. When I first started learning French, just studying grammar rules and vocabulary lists made it seem more like learning a secret code than an actual living language. It never really stuck with me.  Only after participating in a summer study program in France, where I heard it, read it and used it every day did the language really become real to me and my learning increased dramatically.

Language learners can't always spend a summer in another country, however, so we have to consider the next best alternative. It is not always possible to spend time every day with a native speaker, either. How can we get the most language input possible, therefore, without being immersed in an environment where it is spoken?

READ! Find a book or magazine or a news article on a subject that interests you, and at a level where you can reasonably understand around 80% of it (the rest you can usually figure out from context) and READ! This kind of language input can help you learn English naturally, rather than by trying to memorize it's rules and vocabulary lists. It's probably a lot more fun, too.