Give the Rein to the Brain #2

In this blog post, I want to give practical strategies on Reading – Writing – Vocabulary Memorization.

My students often ask me how to read in a more effective and autonomous way to:

• retain information,
• understand and use new words and phrases.

Here are the strategies and tips that you can implement:

1. Read a part of the text out loud (use Google to help you with pronunciation)
2. Summarize the main idea in your own words (do not worry if you make any grammar or vocabulary mistakes for now)
3. While reading focus on the words you already know and the meaning (do not worry about the words you don’t know)
4. Read the same part of the text again for details and try to answer all WH-questions: How? Who? What? When? Where? Why? 
5. Connect this part of the text with your experience: how does it make you feel? what did you like about it? what didn’t you like about it? what lessons can I learn from it? 
6. Choose from 3 to 7 new words
7. Try to understand these new words in context: 

a. Look at the full sentence where the new word is and especially at the words surrounding the new word 

b. Look at how the part of speech (a noun, an adjective, a verb, an adverb, an idiom)

c. Use English-English dictionary only! 

d. Study other example sentences in the dictionary

e. Go back to the sentence and try to understand the word with the definition again

f. Make examples with the new vocabulary on the topic(s) of your choice

6. Using the new words write  

• a summary of the story 
• questions about the story 
• A small paragraph with the new words
• An email to your friend/ teacher/ coach/ neighbor 
• A diary entry