Jhon Erskin

John Erskin <Show E-Mail>

In my last article I talked about the importance of reading as a method of improving English fluency. In this article, I want to continue along that line of thought by giving some specific strategies that have helped my students and will help yours, too.

These reading strategies will work both in and out of the classroom, but are particularly useful in the classroom. If learned and applied daily, these reading strategies will help your students improve both their reading comprehension and test scores. So let's begin.

NOTE: For the rest of this article I will use the second person pronoun 'you' rather than the possessive adjective 'their' as a matter if convenience and because, if applied these strategies will help anyone who wishes to improve their English.

Strategy 1: Ignore words that are unimportant.

When reading, you may often come upon a word or phrase that you don't understand. Your first impulse may be to look up the word in your dictionary. Before resorting to a dictionary, though, you should first determine whether the word you don't know is important. If it isn't, then ignore it. Consider the following sentence.

The farvenugen truck was parked in front of the house.

What does the word farvennugen mean? You probably don't know, right? Now ask yourself, Is the word farvennugen important in understanding the sentence? No, not really. We can tell that farvennugen is being used as an adjective, but it isn't important to the meaning of the sentence. The point of the sentence is where the truck was parked, not what kind of truck it is, so, we can ignore that word and still understand the sentence.

Strategy 2: Use context to guess the meaning.

If you follow Strategy 1, and you determine that the word you don't know IS important, then before using a dictionary, try to guess the meaning of the word from the context. Context refers to the words and phrases surrounding the word that you don't understand. Once you think you have guessed the correct meaning, then look up the word in your dictionary to insure you have made a correct guess. Then practice using the word in different contexts. This will help you increase your understanding of the word, which in turn will help you increase your vocabulary.

Being able to guess the meaning of words from their context is a skill that is particularly helpful when you come across idioms. For example, in the sentence

Jimmy lost track of time and was late for class,

the phrase lost track of time is an idiom that means to forget about the time. If you didn't know the meaning of this idiom and you looked up each word in the dictionary, you still would not understand the

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