Reading Strategies & Stories

The purpose of your reading will help you choose appropriate direct strategies. For example, are you just trying to get the overall idea of the text? You might choose to skim the text in this case. Are you trying to find some specific information? You might choose to scan for that information. Are you trying to evaluate whether the text might be very biased in some way? You might choose to look at the source carefully or look for language that plays on your emotions.

Like we mentioned before, the type of text (genre) can relate strongly to what kinds of strategies are most helpful for reading it. Is it a graphic novel that you can read for pleasure without worrying about every word, using visual clues for context? Is it a prompt in a written exam that you must read very carefully word for word? Is it a chart or graph that you can scan to find specific answers in?

This can be as thoughtful as a specific SMART goal or as casual as a reminder on your phone to leave 10, 20, or 30 minutes at the end of your day or during a break to read a little in your L2, for fun or for studying.

Although we are emphasizing in this book how much you can learn independently, if you have an opportunity to take a language class, take advantage of the fact that the teacher is already choosing readings more or less at your level. Make the best use of the reading resources that are part of the class or that the teacher might be able to point you to.

Where and when are you most comfortable reading? Do you like to find a quiet place with good natural light? Do you like reading in your bed? Do you like reading on your phone whenever you have a few minutes? Think about what works for you and go for it.

Many of us like a hot drink in winter, or a cool one in summer, to keep us company while we read. Snacks are great too as long as it’s not mindless eating. Make reading a pleasure!

Reading does not have to just be an individual activity that you do passively. You can explain or discuss what you’ve read with a classmate or friend to help you process the meaning, organize your thoughts about it, and remember key vocabulary.

If you already enjoy playing games online, try those games in your target language with others who are using that language. Usually there is a lot of reading associated with the gameplay, either as part of the game itself, or written by the players.

If you’re taking a language class or working in your L2 you may need to read some things that are less interesting sometimes. But when we are learning a language we can also read for pleasure and choose what we are reading. What do you like to read in your L1? Short stories? Online articles? Social media? Do the same thing in your L2, as we discussed earlier in this chapter.

Think about what you know about the topic or context in the reading. How much do you already know about it? Can you ‘fill in the blanks’ if you can’t understand all the description or explanation in the text? For example, if you are reading a news article online in your L2 about climate change, think about what you already know or have experienced related to that topic. This is your prior schemata and it will help you to engage with the content more quickly and actively.

Use your background knowledge and your understanding of the reading so far to guess what is going to happen next. This can help activate further schemata in your mind and help you recognize or guess new words in your L2. Even if you are wrong it will make the new content ‘stickier’.

Titles and headings contain the key ideas of the text – read these most carefully in newspapers, online articles, academic papers, and textbooks. This strategy can be particularly helpful if you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by a wall of text in your L2.

It may be obvious that visuals such as pictures, photos, and videos will help you understand genres such as graphic novels, newspapers, blogs, or children’s books. But visuals can be more than images. Even noticing how paragraph structure relates to outline of a text, how headings are positioned, and which words are bolded or italicized can help you see the organization and flow of key ideas.

This strategy relates to the one about using your background knowledge (schemata). If you saw the following sentence and didn’t know the word in the blank spot, what would you guess the word was? She was having trouble navigating the stairs with her _________s. She hoped her broken foot would heal soon. You might guess the word crutches because you know her foot is broken, that people with a broken foot might use crutches, and that crutches are hard to use on stairs. Before stopping to look up a word you don’t know, see if you can guess from the rest of the linguistic context.

In the example above, the unknown word has an ‘s’ at the end of it: She was having trouble navigating the stairs with her _________s. She hoped her broken foot would heal soon. Readers who understand that plural nouns in English are usually marked with an ‘s’ would know that the unknown word is probably plural. This knowledge can help you narrow down your guess. You know the answer is not cane for example.

Especially if you are reading something intensively and must understand each word, it is best to read the whole thing through for meaning the first time, then return to it for closer reading, as we discussed in the Principles section. If you try to understand each word one by one the first time through, you might miss the big picture or implied meanings that are easily lost if you are too narrowly focused. It is like looking only down in front of your feet as you walk instead of also looking up and ahead to see where the path is leading you.

There is nothing wrong with using a dictionary or translation tools if you are using them to truly learn and not just to get through a homework assignment without thinking. Good dictionaries like Word Reference will provide related words, examples in context, and audio clips in addition to definitions. Translation tools like Reverso or Google Translate can give you an idea of what longer phrases and sentences mean, though they are notoriously inaccurate at times, especially with subtle differences in pragmatics or style.

Remember you can combine the skills of listening and reading, such as when you are watching a show or a movie. You can read the subtitles aloud as you listen. Remember you can slow down the playback speed if you want to.

One of the best ways to use AI is to ask it to create stories or other genres of texts in your second language. You can specify your level, and adjust your level if the level is too high or low. Be cautious, however, because AI usually does not reflect linguistic diversity, just standardized varieties.

If you are reading an online text that you are having trouble understanding, you can try pasting it into an AI tool to see if it can help you with the meaning. You can ask it to summarize key points of the reading in the target language, or interpret implied meanings. Just be careful that you do not rely on AI to do your thinking for you! Check your own interpretation against that of AI to see if you agree and if you trust what AI is telling you.

You can also ask AI to analyze the grammar, vocabulary, or pragmatics of the text, to help you see linguistic patterns and understand why they might be there. For example, you could ask AI to explain why the simple vs. perfect tense was used in different parts of a story, or which words in a dialogue might be related to politeness. Again, use your own judgment and don’t trust AI blindly. It could easily be wrong!

Often just reading the first sentences of paragraphs gives you a clue to what the whole text is about. Quickly skimming over the introduction, conclusion, and main headings of a text also gives you the main ideas.

Are you looking for a particular name, date, fact or theme? Look over the text with just that goal in mind until you see it pop out. Knowing the genre can make this easier: If you’re reading a bill, you know to look for the total amount in the corner. If you’re reading a map, you can scan for the names of places you want to go.

When you read a second time, you can focus in on specific things that you want to notice and learn explicitly. For example, you can highlight or copy new idioms or specific grammatical structures. You can write these elements in a vocabulary journal to look over later.

Building automatic recognition of how graphemes (letters, characters, radicals, diacritics) are pronounced in your L2 is an important step for novice readers, and continues to be important as you level up. Some languages, such as Hawai’ian, Spanish, and Korean have straightforward sound-grapheme correspondences, while others (such as English and Mandarin) have more variations and exceptions.

Texting quickly makes for very strange message errors sometimes, especially if autocorrect corrects something in an unexpected way. It can also be hard to know what someone really means in writing, even with helpful emojis. When these things happen, texts can become ambiguous. This is where you need to have a higher tolerance for multiple possible meanings, and it’s a great opportunity to use what you know about your relationship with the person texting, context clues, and common sense to grasp the overall meaning of the text. Don’t be too quick to jump to interpretations that might not be right.

Since this is interpersonal mode, you can ask questions in the moment to clarify what they just wrote to you!

If the person who is writing you is more proficient in the language and you learn some new words, phrases, or slang, you can try using it too! For example, notice how they say hello or goodbye, and adopt the same phrases yourself (as long as the pragmatics are the same).

Much of the time the basic emojis are used similarly across languages, but sometimes there are some differences. If you’re texting with someone from another languaculture, don’t assume you are using emojis the same way. For example, “in China the slightly smiling emoji is not really used as a sign of happiness at all. As it is by far the least enthusiastic of the range of positive emojis available, the use of this emoji instead implies distrust, disbelief, or even that someone is humouring you” (Rawlings, 2018, para. 12).

The What Can I Read at My Level? CASLS video below provides a different point of view on finding appropriately leveled reading material. They suggest that instead of focusing on finding texts at the right level of difficulty, you can simply change the purpose of your reading. For example, novice level readers can focus on finding answers to basic questions like who, where, when, what, even in a more complex text. This video shows that there are many ways you can choose to approach reading, depending on your own motivations, purposes, and needs.