Reading: Improving Your Reading Skills

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Because reading is such a critical skill, you want to always seek ways to improve your reading. The more you practice, the better. And when you’re reading, you can follow a few tips or strategies that will enhance the reading and help you develop your reading skills. These include working on your vocabulary and reading more.

Building Your Vocabulary

The more words you know, the easier and faster you’ll be able to read. Your comprehension will also improve. You have a few ways to build your vocabulary. You may take vocabulary as part of your English classes, where you specifically study this topic and seek to learn new terms, understand their meaning, and use them appropriately. If not, you may find that workbooks or flashcards help improve and increase your vocabulary.

To be a good reader, you have to not only be able to quickly recognize words but also know their meaning. Be alert for words that you don’t recognize or know the meaning for, and then use a dictionary to look up any words for which you don’t know the meaning. Also consider developing your own list of words and their meanings as you go through your readings.

As another option, you may decide to make it a point to learn a set number of new words each day. While you probably wouldn’t want to read the dictionary, you can find word-a-day calendars or e-mail messages that can help you learn new words. Or you might make or purchase vocabulary flashcards and make a game of it.

Another tactic when you come across a word you don’t know is to guess at the word’s meaning based on the sentence. Even if you don’t know the word, you can probably figure out its meaning by reviewing how it’s used in a sentence. Test your guess against the real meaning by using your dictionary.

When you paraphrase your reading, learn also to paraphrase terms, especially new terms or words you don’t know. Don’t just read the dictionary definition, but be able to define the terms using your own words.

Learn to break a word down. Our language is based on previous languages, most commonly Latin and Greek. (Learning the origin of a word is learning its etymology.) When you learn different parts of words and how they’re combined, you can often guess the meaning of a word. For example, “ology” means “study of” and “theo” means God; therefore, what do you think the word theology would mean?

Read More and Be an Active Reader

Another way to read better is to read more. If you read a lot, like most things, you get better. So read a variety of different types of writing.

Practice your skimming, too. For example, pick up a newspaper and skim the front page. You can probably immediately retell the main stories of that day. You can apply these same scanning/skimming skills to other reading.

Don’t just read, think! Think of questions, anticipate what your instructor may emphasize, and make notes. But also anticipate what’s going to happen next. For example, if you’re reading about a science experiment, perhaps you can predict the results. If reading literature (covered in the following section), guess the ending. Writing progresses from one idea to the next, so anticipating what will follow helps you make that transition and connect one idea to the next.

In class, when you discuss the reading, be sure to participate. Ask questions. Express your opinion on what you think about the reading. Get clarification for any ideas or concepts that are unclear to you. Listen to what your classmates think about the reading.