Introduction: Learn English by reading widely

In terms of Taiwan’s environment, the best way to learn English well is to read it widely.In terms of the needs of modern intellectuals, the most effective method of learning English is still to read widely.The tools required for extensive reading are: font source analysis and sentence pattern analysis.Properly using these two tools and continuous extensive reading can break through the bottleneck of English learning and make significant progress in listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Let’s first take a look at the historical evolution of English teaching methods to understand the role played by Guangdu.

There are five main types of orthodox English teaching methods in the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), including grammar Translation, sentence pattern practice, communication method, reading method, and comprehensive method.The following are explained separately.

Syntax translation method

This is the longest-lasting and most influential teaching method in the history of English teaching.This method originated from the sixteenth century - there was only English grammar since the sixteenth century, and before that, only Latin grammar.Once English grammar is available, some people began to use grammatical translation to teach English.The method is that teachers teach a complete grammar system in their native language in class, and when explaining sample essays, they use native language translation in large quantities.

Grammatical translation is of great help to English (reading and writing).However, this method does not seem to be very helpful for speaking English (listening and speaking).Students trained in this way usually have good English reading and writing skills, but often lack listening skills.

Sentence pattern practice method

During World War II, the US military was stationed around the world and must be able to communicate with local people.The English teaching methods adopted by various countries have long been mainly grammatical translation methods, and their English listening and speaking skills are generally weak, resulting in serious shortage of translators in the military.The US Department of Defense then commissioned American linguistics experts to plan and design a quick training course for listening and speaking skills, hoping to be brought by the US military to all over the world and train enough local talents to serve as military translators in a short period of time.The product designed at that time was the sentence pattern practice method.

As for the US Department of Defense, the advantage of sentence pattern practice is that it can be done with me: avoid the native language and fully use English teaching.Each course is divided into two classes: Substitution Drills are performed in the previous section, and live sessions are performed in the next section.

The teaching of sentence pattern practice completely abandons grammatical translation, but instead organizes and summarizes English sentences into several limited sentence patterns.Students first use substitution exercises to become familiar with a sentence pattern in class.In the second half of the class, teachers should use textbooks and aids, design some situations, and let students practice live conversations in groups to use the sentence patterns they just learned.The theoretical basis of sentence pattern practice is “internalization”: students “internalize” a sentence pattern (that is, “habits become nature”) through sentence pattern practice and live conversations.When encountering relevant conversation situations in the future, as long as the appropriate words are substituted into the internalized sentence pattern, various meanings can be fully expressed.

The sentence pattern practice method was successfully trained by the US military around the world, and this teaching method was also popular.In 1970s, I studied in the English Department of Normal University. My class teacher, Professor Chen Xuji, taught us this teaching method of her returning from the University of Hawaii.In addition, textbooks such as Intensive Course in English and English 900 have been used to this day are also the products of this teaching method.Moreover, schools at all levels have built speech labs (language labs), and this trend is also caused by sentence pattern practice.Because the substitution practice part of the sentence pattern practice method is “one prompt, one reaction”, the interaction between teachers and students is quite mechanized and machines can replace human power, so a voice laboratory is needed to replace teachers.

However, although the sentence pattern practice method was very popular, it still exposed some disadvantages after a long time.First of all, its replacement exercises are too rigid and difficult to attract students’ interest.What’s more serious is that after experiments, a new group of scholars overturned the “internalization” theory of sentence pattern practice.In other words, there are problems with the basic theory of sentence pattern practice method and should not be an effective learning method.However, the original use of sentence pattern practice was indeed successful.Scholars observe the contradictions in this, and therefore notice the “live conversation” part of the sentence pattern practice method, and a new English teaching method emerged.

Communication method

The course of sentence pattern practice is divided into two parts: replacement exercises and live conversations.Since there is theoretically problems with the replacement exercises, is the success of the sentence pattern practice caused by the live session in the second half of the class?The scholar then carefully studied live conversations and thus developed a communication method.

The so-called communication method emphasizes that language is aimed at communication, and language learning is also carried out in communication.It distinguishes the use of language into some “functions”.Learners start with the simplest function, learn how to communicate in English, and gradually advance to increasingly complex functions.Teachers should prepare a large number of textbooks, aids and design activities before class. During class, teachers should take the role of tutoring from the side, so that students can actively participate in the activities and achieve their learning goals.For example, “How to Order in a Buffet Restaurant” is an important feature that language learners must learn, because they will likely use it every day.The teacher first teaches some necessary words and terms, and then lets the students actually order and check out in English in a simulated situation.After class, students may have to go to the buffet restaurant to order their own dishes.

Communication method is an English teaching method developed in the UK and developed in the United States.Like the sentence pattern practice method, it focuses on spoken English (listening and speaking).The difference is that the sentence pattern practice method is a teaching method designed for the EFL environment, and the communication method is a method designed for the ESL environment.

ESL, stands for English as a Second Language “English as a Second Language”.For example, a new immigrant who had just moved from Taiwan to the United States, English is no longer a foreign language for him, but not his native language, but a “second language”.He has the option of attending the Adult English Program “Adult English Course” organized by the U.S. government for new immigrants. What he is exposed to in class is probably the communication method, which is designed for ESL environments.The key point is: After students learn the function of “ordering dishes in buffet restaurants” in class, they have to go to a buffet restaurant to order dishes in English after class.What you learn in the classroom can provide some basic terms, but it is not enough to deal with all possible situations - this new immigrant’s favorite dish may not know how to say it in English.However, what he learned in class at least prevented him from going hungry.Moreover, he has to go to the buffet restaurant to order dishes every day, and sooner or later he will know what the dish says in English.

The situation in Taiwan is different.Although the government is working towards bilingual countries and wants to formulate English as a second language, in fact, English is still a foreign language in Taiwan, and Taiwan’s English learning environment is still the environment of “English as a foreign language”.Although our Ministry of Education vigorously promotes communication methods in schools at all levels in Taiwan, this approach ignores one fact: communication methods are ESL teaching methods in the United Kingdom and the United States and are not applicable to the learning environment of Taiwan’s EFL.In other words: in Taiwan schools, they use the communication method and teach students the language function of “ordering dishes in the buffet restaurant”, but after class, students cannot find a place to order dishes in English.What he learned in class has become useless. Not only can he not expand his learning through repeated use, but he has learned and forgotten it now.During class, teachers and students got along and had a lot of fun. They forgot everything after class, and the next class was blank again.In Taiwan, most classrooms that truly adopt the communication method to teach, whether in schools or cram schools, face this vicious cycle.In Taiwan’s EFL learning environment, it is often futile to force the use of British and American ESL learning methods.

Reading method

To make up for the shortcomings of the EFL environment, the necessary supporting measures are reading methods.Students cannot find opportunities to practice listening in an outside environment, but they can easily enter the world of English.This world is broader and richer than the world of spoken English.Moreover, because English is pinyin, the world of text and English can cover the world of spoken English.As long as the method is correct, the reading method can solve the problems of listening, speaking, reading and writing in English in one fell swoop.

The method of reading is to divide English reading into four steps: Intensive Reading, Extensive Reading, Skimming, and Scanning.The first step is to read carefully: with the help of grammatical translation and sentence pattern analysis, we must clarify all aspects of an article from words to sentence pattern, and even the organizational structure and cultural background of the times.

Intensive reading is an important foundation, but it does not represent the whole reading.Most people always stay in the stage of intensive reading when reading English, so the reading speed is slow and the amount of reading is therefore quite limited.The result is that there has always been a bottleneck that cannot be broken through, and listening, speaking, reading and writing have never been able to reach a truly “fluential”.

To break through this bottleneck, the most effective way is to enter the second stage of reading method: read widely.The so-called extensive reading is simply to follow personal interests and continue to read a lot, fast and unexplained reading.The practice will be described in detail below.

The third stage of reading is skimming, that is, quickly browsing a book or article and focusing on the key points.If you are looking for information to write a paper, find fifty books in the library, or 500 articles on the Internet, and want to quickly understand which books and articles are helpful for your paper and are worth borrowing or printing, then you have to skim these books or articles and quickly grasp its topic.The fourth stage of reading method is scanning.This job is very similar to the search engine’s search function: search for what you are looking for in a book or article in the shortest time.Scanning skills during exams (such as reading quizzes) can be helpful.Skimming and scanning are both later stories, and the most important task is to read widely.

Comprehensive method

A comprehensive method, simply put it, is to “teach according to aptitude and adapt to local conditions.”It emphasizes that every student has his own learning style and cannot force students to adapt to the same teaching method, but should design learning methods that suit students’ personal experience.

Using the teaching theory of comprehensive methods, the first step for students is to understand their learning style.You can search through the Internet with Learning Style Test for keywords and you can find some free learning style quizzes.Take a self-test online and you can find out whether your learning style is introverted or extroverted, whether it is text-oriented or spoken, etc.

Take friends and classmates you have come into contact with as an example.Some people are very good at reading books and memorizing words, and they can do well in exams, but they just don’t dare to speak English.In addition, some people want to sleep when they see books and often fail the exam, but they like to listen to English songs and make foreign friends at Tianmu’s PUB. There is no problem with English conversation.These two types of students belong to two types, with different learning styles.It is like forcing the former to speak, just like forcing the latter to read a book. It is very painful and half the result with twice the effort.

The comprehensive method does not exclude any learning method, but requires students to understand their learning style, their own needs and environmental limitations, and then follow the trend.Teachers also need to understand their teaching style.

The above is an introduction to the five formal teaching methods of TESOL.Next, let’s take a look at the method of reading widely.

Definition of extensive reading

网路上有一份给英文教师看的期刊 JALT ，里面给广读下了一个不错的定义：

Our working definition of ‘extensive reading’ as a language teaching/learning procedure is that it is reading (a) of large quantities of material or long texts; (b) for global or general understanding; (c) with the intention of obtaining pleasure from the text. Further, because (d) reading is individualized, with students choosing the books they want to read, (e) the books are not discussed in class. (JALT)

How to read widely

From this definition, reading widely is a large number of long and long readings, without seeking much understanding, and everything is based on interest.

Students often ask me to recommend materials for reading extensively.I will list several websites below for readers’ reference, but I do not recommend which ones.Because, extensive reading must be able to last for a long time before the results can be seen. If you want to continue, you must not be forced at all. You must read “relish with relish”.Therefore, the material for extensive reading must be something that readers personally like.Everyone has different interests.Some people like novels, and some people like knowledge.It is also a novel category, and it is divided into literature, art, detective, thriller, science fiction and other categories, each with its own preferences.Only readers know what kind of content can attract you to continue reading.

It should be noted that the widely read materials must be suitable for the reader in terms of difficulty.Most students are used to reading articles beyond their own level because they were trained in grammatical translation and intensive reading.By looking up words one by one and analyzing grammatical sentence patterns, we slowly translate sentences into Chinese to understand.This is the practice of intensive reading.The practice of extensive reading is different. You must read quickly and read a lot, and you must be able to maintain your reading habit for a long time.Basically, when reading widely, do not look up words or understand them very much. As long as you can roughly understand what the article is saying and can maintain your interest in reading.Under this premise, it should not be too difficult to read widely.If the articles you read are too much beyond your own level, you must look up words and analyze sentence patterns to understand them, which will become intensive reading.

To determine whether the difficulty of an article is suitable for reading widely, you might as well open the first page to try reading: do not check the words, do not pause, do not look back, and read the text on this page in one go from beginning to end (this is the method of reading widely).If you don’t know what it is talking about at all, then this article is too difficult for you.If you don’t recognize a few words or understand a few sentences, but you can basically see what the article is talking about, this is a widely read article suitable for you.This method can be used to test: Do you think this article is good?If you read in a wide-read way without looking up words or looking for a lot of explanations, and still think it looks good and can attract you to continue reading, then it is the wide-read material suitable for you.

Read materials

Excellent extensive reading materials should be diverse in content and suitable for all kinds of readers’ different interests, but not too difficult in terms of degree.There are some materials on the market for people to read widely, including novels and non-fiction. The difficulty of the words and sentence patterns used have been screened, so readers can consider purchasing.However, once the extensive reading action begins, the speed of consuming reading materials is quite fast. If you have to buy them all, you may be economically overwhelmed.In fact, there are some free extensive reading materials available on the Internet. The following are several for readers to refer to.

VOA Special English

VOA is Voice of America, Voice of America Radio.It shoulders the task of the US government’s external propaganda and broadcasts a lot of Iron Curtain countries during the Cold War.In order to achieve the promotional effect, many VOA programs are broadcasted using special English, which means broadcasting with rewritten, words and sentence patterns are particularly simple, and read slowly and clearly, so that listeners who are not very good in English can understand it.

VOA’s website is a website that cooperates with the radio station. The Special English part on the site has a large number of articles, divided into various topics, and it is about half an hour’s report. There are text files and sound files that can be downloaded for free.Because its topics are all-encompassing, it is easy for readers to find topics of interest to them.Moreover, its English difficulty is controlled, which is very suitable for readers of ordinary levels to use as a material for extensive reading.

CDLP

CDLP represents California Distance Learning Project, funded by the California Department of Education and sponsored by the California State University system. The Sacramento County Government is responsible for the management and operation of the online version.

This online magazine aims to promote adult education. The English language used is also a low-difficulty and suitable for widespread reading. The topics are divided into eleven items, including work, law, family, school, etc., and there are many articles below.The theme is rich and the difficulty is moderate, which is very suitable for reading widely.

The Key

This is the online version of a magazine published by Milwaukee Area Technical College, a university that specializes in the so-called new readers. The text in it is also controlled to a relatively low difficulty and is suitable for wide-read reading materials.The disadvantage is that the frequency of updates is not very high, but it also accumulates a considerable amount of archives for use.The above three are all rewritten as Special English and convenient to read.After readers spend a while reading these things and gradually improving their reading speed and comprehension abilities, they can try to read some unrewrited English original works.There is a website worth introducing to all readers:

Project Gutenberg

This is the largest online electronic library, completely free.The disadvantage is that most of its things are older.International copyright law stipulates that copyright protection time is mostly seventy years after the author’s death.Seventy years later, the copyright of the work will automatically disappear and enter the field of public finance.Project Gutenberg is mostly full of these things that have no copyright.This library not only welcomes free downloads, but also can request the electronic version of its collection of tens of thousands of books.

Although the things in Project Gutenberg are relatively old, they are all-inclusive in terms of themes and can be found in the subject matter that readers are interested in.The disadvantage is that the collection of books is all original and has not been simplified, and readers of ordinary levels may not be able to understand it.Please first pass the three types of extensive reading trainings introduced earlier, and then try to challenge Project Gutenberg.

The needs of extensive reading and intellectuals

The communication method promoted by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan is not suitable for the learning environment of Taiwan’s EFL, and on the other hand, it is not suitable for the needs of modern intellectuals.Because the communication method transforms from sentence pattern practice methods, all focus on speaking English.But the field of speaking English is actually quite poor.As a modern intellectual, what you need is not only the ability to listen and speak in English - any American illiterate has this ability - more importantly, the ability to read and write.

More than 80% of the information on the Internet is stored in English.The fastest way for modern people to check any information is to surf the Internet.To write a report or paper, searching for information online is not afraid of not being able to find it, but fear of being unable to digest it - it is often found that thousands or tens of thousands of data are found, and I don’t know where to start.At this time, strong reading ability - especially extensive reading and skimming - becomes particularly important.A modern intellectual must have the ability to digest a large amount of written materials in a short time, and take out the parts that he needs to refer to or quote from them, and then add personal opinions to write his own report or paper.This ability cannot be handled by simple conversational training.You must go through a lot of extensive reading, absorb a lot of information, and cultivate solid extensive reading and skimming skills in order to win in the fiercely competitive workplace or academic circles.

Read and listen to lectures

Readers may ask: Guangpu is training in English for writing, so what should I do if I speak English?Actually, this is a unnecessary worry.As long as you read more extensively, the problem of speaking English will be solved at the same time.

Inadequate listening ability may be divided into two situations.One is that you can’t understand it, but you can read it slowly.This problem is that the understanding speed is too slow and can be overcome by reading widely.Read correctly should be much faster than speaking.But what most people are used to reading intensively, and they have to read a sentence several times.If you develop the habit of reading widely, your reading speed will be faster than that of ordinary people. At this time, you are already thinking in English - this speed does not allow you to have time to turn every sentence into Chinese.After breaking through the bottleneck of reading speed, it also breaks through the bottleneck of English thinking.Moreover, English is pinyin, and all the sounds are inside when reading.As long as you can get used to the speed of extensive reading, the speed of listening comprehension will naturally be solved.

Another situation is: if you can’t understand, if you write it down and read it slowly, or if you can’t understand it.This means that the overall English level is not enough.How to improve your English level?In Taiwan’s EFL learning environment, the best way is to read widely!

Pronunciation issues

When learning English by reading widely, there is only one blind spot: no practice of oral pronunciation.Reading a lot without the opportunity to speak is likely to result in a lack of standard pronunciation.

However, because English has become an international language, it is actually natural for people from all countries to speak English with their own national and local accents.The English pronunciation standard is at most to make others misunderstand that you are an ABC, and there is no benefit.Instead of pursuing the standard of pronunciation, it is better to pursue fluent and smooth expression.Language is just a communication tool.The purpose of being able to express opinions smoothly and unimpededly has been achieved, so why not have a little accent?You should have heard reporters from BBC and CNN interview experts in standard British and American English. The English spoken by those experts are often very ugly, with heavy accents and unstandard pronunciation.But they are experts - because they have read many books, which is more important.

Reading and writing

As the saying goes, “If you read three hundred Tang poems well, you will be wrong if you can’t recite poems.”Reading and writing are two sides of the same. When the amount of reading accumulates to a large enough level, you will naturally know how to write.

However, being able to write is one thing, and writing well is another.Most Americans have done a lot of reading in their lives, but not many people write well in English.Most Americans write English in many errors and do not meet the requirements of senior intellectuals.To write well, you must receive good grammatical sentence training.

Training of grammatical sentence patterns is of great help for intensive reading: when you encounter sentences that you cannot understand, you can often think about the meaning of the sentence with the help of analysis of grammatical sentence patterns.In addition, the most helpful thing in grammatical sentence training is English writing.

Among the four tasks of listening, speaking, reading and writing, writing is the last and most difficult one.If you haven’t read a few English articles, it’s useless to go anywhere to take a writing class - that’s like cooking without rice.The correct way is to do a long period of extensive reading and accumulate a lot of input, and you will feel how to write English.Then, through the training of grammatical sentence patterns, we need to establish a structure from simple sentences to compound sentences to simplified clauses, so that the written sentences can be correct and full of variation.

Just as extensive reading and font analysis are the best combination of conquering English words, extensive reading and grammatical sentence analysis are the best combination of conquering English writing.Font source analysis and grammatical sentence analysis can be learned in class and read books, while the work of reading widely depends on yourself.As long as you read according to your interests, do not look up words or understand them very much, once you experience the fun of reading, you no longer need anyone’s encouragement, and you will naturally go all the way and your English will naturally get better and better.