Craig Dodge - Blog

The most common complaint I hear from EFL/ESL students about reading in English is that there are too many words they don't understand. They spend too much time looking words up in a dictionary so they can't really enjoy the book.

I understand the frustration. I felt the same way when I was learning French. First there was the issue of unfamiliar vocabulary words. Then there was the issue of different verb conjugation between spoken and written French. I didn't spend much time reading, either.

Guess what! You don't need to understand every word to enjoy a book and understand most of what's in it. Don't get stuck on every word that you don't know and stop reading to look it up in the dictionary. When you are reading, the best strategy is to focus instead on the main idea. Focus on the words you DO understand, instead of the ones you don't. This way, you can get the author's main idea and often figure out the words you were not familiar with.

Reading for the main idea is useful for both reading for pleasure (novels) as well as for study. When you are reading a novel, if you can get the author's main idea, you can still understand and enjoy the story.  If you are reading a text book or taking a test, you will usually perform better if you can at least get the main idea, even if there are some words you don't understand. In both cases, when you focus on the words that you do understand and read for main idea, you can often figure out the words you don't know on your own without looking them up in a dictionary.

Here is my advice:

When you are reading, underline or highlight unfamiliar words, but don't look them up in a dictionary. Read the whole paragraph first and see if 1) you can understand the main idea and 2) can you figure out what the unfamiliar words might mean. After you finish a chapter, then go back and look up a few of the unfamiliar words in a dictionary and see if you were right. Keep practicing this way and you will develop the skill of finding the main idea as well as figuring out unfamiliar words on your own. Reading will be more enjoyable.

When choosing a book to read, there are a couple things to consider. First, get something you are interested in. If you are not interested in the topic, it will be boring and more difficult to understand. Second, sometimes it's helpful if it's a book that you've already read in your own language or if it's been made into a movie that you've seen. When you are familiar with the story, you can more easily figure out some of the new words. Lastly, if over 20% of the words were unfamiliar to you, then the book is probably too hard for you. You would be better off choosing an easier book.

If your teacher is not giving you anything to read, one good source of easier reading is Penguin Readers . You can check out their web site, or find their books in many book stores in Taipei.