Brief introduction to the importance of English reading

There can be no doubt that English is one of the world’s most widely used languages. People use a language in three ways: as a native language, as a second language, or as a foreign language. English is spoken as a native language by over three hundred million people in the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, some Caribbean countries and South Africa.

As a second language, English is often necessary for official business, education, information and other activities in many countries. It is one of the few “working” languages of the United Nations. English has in fact become the language of international cooperation is science and technology and so on. English reading is becoming more and more popular.

It is not the possession of examinations and people have more chances to read English compositions nowadays. No matter what purpose the readers have, such as finding materials, getting information or chatting on line, they will have to connect with English compositions more and more frequently in all aspects of their daily life. No matter at what aspects, we have become increasingly internationalized. Moreover, there are more and more people start to learn English.

After we have known the importance of English, what we must know is that learning English is a process. In usual, we learn a language by listening, speaking, reading and writing. In these aspects, reading is very important. Reading is a basic ability in obtaining knowledge.

With the development of society, English reading is becoming more and more important. No matter what purposes the readers have, such as finding materials, getting information or chatting on line, the reader will have to connect with English reading more frequently in all aspects of the daily life.

Brief illustration of the basic skills in English reading and the significance of meaning guessing skills

Reading depends on reading ability; and it is a cognitive process. It starts with perception. It requires perceptual learning and ends up as a conceptual process: reading is more than reconstruction of the author’s meanings. It is the perception of those meanings process. Reading is also a lot of the relevant experience of the reader — a much more active and demanding process.

Reading also involves an interaction between thought and language, like a guessing game. Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all elements but from skills in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guess that are right the first time.

The ability to anticipate what has not been vital in reading , just as the ability to anticipate what has not been heard in listening (Kenneth Goodman, 1970) it is therefore general acknowledged that using context to determine the meaning of unknown words in inherent in the skill of reading foreign languages, yet little attention has been natured of this relationship.

However, the reading skill is the technique of finding the meaning of an unknown in a sentence and then guessing how it is pronounced. It is known as context identification, or the use of context clues. And word guessing is the most important skill used by most readers in attacking new words. It is closely related to comprehension and this is one of the most practical skills should to be learned.

Reading skills are also many for you to learn. If you know a little reading skill, you could guess new word in your reading and make the reading easily. When you finished reading an essay or novel fluently, you must be confident and willing to read another article.

The good reading skills will make you interested in reading. When you meet a problem in reading, remembering those skills — by definition; by synonym, near-synonym; by antonym and comparing relation; by enumerating sentences; by repeated words；by relationship of cause and effect causality ; by prefix and suffix, by general knowledge, life experience and logical inference. In those ways you must find a way you need and the good ways will help you make the new word clearly.

to be continued…