Why You Should Listen? 

Improving reading skills can be a real challenge because it is largely an activity that you do on your own. 

Unless you’re reading out loud for someone, or reading to answer questions at school for a test or project, your reading skills are largely something that are hard to see developing because feedback on your progress is well..mostly invisible. 

Invisible unless you start using this strategy... 

One of the best things you can do to grow your reading skills is to become an active reader. 

• That means you are interacting with the material you are reading. 
• As you read, underline and circle ideas you like. 
• Underline new words that you find. 
• Talk back to the writer/author in your notes - imagine you’re having a conversation with them. 

Practice Summarizing!

And finally, related to my story today, at the end of each section or chapter - take a moment and write a brief summary of what you just read. 

This will help you organize the ideas you took in as you were reading. It will also help you figure out how well you were understanding what you are reading. 

If you notice a section is hard, maybe go back and reread it. Pay attention to the parts that are more difficult for you. 

Pay attention to any new words that might be making it hard for you to follow. 

Think of summaries as an opportunity to check in with yourself to see if you’re following the main ideas of the writer. 

NOTE: this is not a tip for the actual CELPIP exam day. You won’t have time to write summaries and engage with the text in the way I am describing here. This is a tip for developing your skills over time. 

Helpful Links

I’ve created several podcast episodes and blog posts about how to develop your reading skills:

A playlist from my podcast around developing reading skills.

From My Blog:

Improve your reading skills. (A group if blog posts that I have created around reading skill development.)

Thank you for listening to today’s podcast episode. If you’ve enjoyed it, please subscribe to the show on your favourite podcast app. See you next Tuesday! 

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Thanks and see you next Tuesday!

Well, hello there, and welcome to the Speak English Fearlessly podcast. This is the podcast from motivated English learners who want to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the CELPIP exam. I also love the feature encouraging interviews with regular people. People just like you who are working towards becoming fluent in English so we can learn from their experiences together.

Who am I? My name is Aaron Nelson. I've been an English teacher for over 16 years and I now work to help students prepare for the CELPIP exam through online classes.

This past week, I had the wonderful opportunity to get to know a little bit one of my listeners to this podcast. His name is Charisma. Charisma, thank you for being a regular listener, my friend, and thank you for filling out that survey that I keep talking about at the end of the podcast and for sharing your feedback with me.

Your ideas. Your encouragement meant a lot to me. And in our conversation you asked if I could provide some more help with how to improve your reading skills. So that, my friend, is what this podcast is about today.

I want to share some more helpful tips and ideas and strategies to help you grow your reading skills, because improving reading skills is quite a challenge, isn't it?

And here's why I think reading skills can be hard to make improvements on. The thing is, unless you're reading aloud for someone or if you're reading to answer questions for school, for like a test or a project, your reading skills are largely something that's hard to see developing because you don't get feedback on your progress like you would if you're, you know, answering questions for a test.

I mean, you're going to get feedback quickly in that way, but most of the time we're not in a classroom situation where we're answering questions where in real life and well, you don't get a lot of feedback on on reading. So today I'd like to share with you some ways that you can be working on improving your reading skills in English.

And by the way, these tips will help you both in general as you're working to improve your English skills and your reading skills in general. And if you're preparing for the CELPIP exam, they apply to both situations, and I'm going to repeat this at the end, but these tips are not going to be helpful for you during this CELPIP exam.

In fact, don't do them during the CELPIP exam because it's going to totally rob your time. You'll run out of time completely. You won't be able to answer the questions if you're trying to do these things during the exam. So you're being warned right now. These are not for during the test. These tips are for preparing for the test beforehand, months beforehand.

And if you're not preparing for the CELPIP exam, these tips are perfect to help you develop your skills in general in English.

I have the maximum load of classes that you are allowed to have, and it's so busy. It's so insanely busy. Looking back at it, I still scratch my head and wonder how I survived that time.

It was the most class taking, the most studying, the most reading, the most writing, the most academic work I have done in my life. At that point in my life, I was so busy between studying and working part time because I was working part time as well that I had to schedule bathroom breaks in order to get my homework done. It was so intense and like I said before, I have no idea how I made it through that time.

But I'll never forget something that I learned during one of our orientation classes at the very beginning of my university year, and I feel like this tip alone helped me make it through each of my classes. It's something that only took a few minutes after each class every day, but it gave me so much more time in return and a sense of being in control and understanding what was going on in my classes.

That valuable lesson was this: At the end of each class, give yourself a few minutes and write a brief summary of the most important points you recall from the lecture or what you did during the class. Only refer to your notes if you have to.

That was it. There was nothing magical about it, but it made a world of difference for me. And after every class and often minutes before the next one would begin, I would avoid visiting with my friends. I wouldn't be standing around in the halls doing nothing, waiting for the next class to begin. No, none of that.

Instead, I'd make my way immediately to the university's library if I had time, or I'd just plop right down in the hall next to the next class that I would have to go to. I would pull out my notebook and quickly jot down a summary of what had just happened in the class.

If there were things that I know I wasn't understanding, I'd write those questions down and I would use those questions later when I'm talking with my friends, I'd ask them,

"Hey, did you understand what the teacher was talking about when they mentioned this or that?"

Or if I was really stuck, I would write the question down and go and visit the teacher during their office hours to get feedback and to get help with what I wasn't understanding.

These few minutes at the end of every class, and I made it my practice that after every class I would do this, I would either be sitting on the floor in the hall outside of the next class If I didn't have time to make it to the library, or I'd be in the quiet, a quiet corner in the library, writing furiously before my next class began.

But without fail, I did this after every single class, and it made such a big difference to me.

So what does that have to do with developing your reading skills? You might be asking and how can that help me get ready for this type of exam? Well, I'm glad you asked. Here's the answer.

One of the best things that you can do to grow your reading skills is to become an active reader. An active reader.

You can be a passive reader and you can be an active reader just like you can be an active student or a passive student. And we're going to talk about that in just a minute.

So if you're being an active reader, it means that you are interacting with the material that you're reading. If you're being an active student, it means that you're interacting with the things that your teacher is teaching you.

In my case, I was interacting with the lectures by, at the end of the class, I'd write down a summary of what I understood.

I'd pretend that I was having a conversation with my teacher sometimes where I would ask questions or I would offer my own thoughts to what they were saying. And you can do the same thing too. And you can do the same thing when you're reading. Interact with the material that you're reading.

That means underline new words that you find. That means underline and circle ideas that you like or dislike. Talk back to the writer or the author in your notes. Imagine that they are sitting across the table from you, maybe having a coffee like I am right now. I'm sipping away at a nice coffee. I just took a drink and I'm imagining that I'm talking to you.

Imagine that you are talking with the author as you read their work. Write questions to them. Write what you think about what they are telling you. Don't just read it and do nothing with the information that you're reading. That's what I'm getting at.

That's the difference between an active reader and a passive reader. A passive reader will just read through it without interacting at all with the text. They're just trying to push through the text. And we've all done that. I've done that.

You know, a couple of episodes ago I shared with you that time just a few years ago when I was in my master's program and I had the read through some of the most brain numbing, boring books that I've ever had to read in my life.

And honestly, I didn't care about interacting with the writer in their book. I was just wanting to push through it. So, I don't think I got too much out of those books other than just wanting to get them done and get them out of my face. I didn't want to see them again, but sadly, that's not an effective way to read. It's not it's it's a terrible way to read. And I want to be encouraging you not to read that way as you're practicing your English.

Instead, be an active reader. Like I said before, as you're read. You should be interacting with what you're reading.

Underline and circle ideas that you like more. Put x's beside the ideas that you think that. Hmm. I don't agree with that or I don't like that. And then think about why. Why do you like it? Why do you dislike it? Maybe write those ideas down in your notes and as I mentioned before, be underlining new words that you find because you will be finding words that you have no idea what they mean.

Maybe the context of the sentence or the paragraph will help you figure out what the word is kind of wanting to say. And that's a good thing. I hope that happens to you a lot.

But as you're going along, you will be finding words that you don't know what they mean. You should be taking note of them.

And finally, this is related to my story today. At the end of each section, like if you're reading a long article, usually those articles or those texts are broken up into sections with, you know, a bold header or a title section. And then there's several blocks of text at the end of each section. If it's a longer one. Or at the end of each chapter, take a moment and write a brief summary of what you just read.

Try not to look back over what you were just reading. See if you can do it from memory. What were the main ideas that the writer was talking about in that section? Write it down.

What were the most important ideas that you liked in that section, or what were the ideas that you were like scratching your head and thinking, I have no clue what he's trying to tell me. Write those down too, but see if you can create or recreate in your own words what the author was talking about in that section.

That's a great way to summarize a chapter or a section. If you notice that the section is really hard, like you can't even write the summary very well because it was just too difficult. Go back and reread it. Pay special attention to the parts that were more difficult for you.

Maybe there were a lot of new words in that section which made it hard for you to understand and maybe the context didn't do a very good job of helping you to figure out what those new words meant. That's okay.

Don't be discouraged by this. Remember, this is practicing in the long term. You're hopefully not trying to use this this strategy or this skill to get you ready for the CELPIP exam next week or next month, because that's not going to work.

Remember in the previous episode last week, I believe we were talking about some of the mistakes that help preparation students make, students make when they're preparing for The CELPIP exam. One of them is not giving themselves enough time.

You need more time than you think.

So, yeah, this is something that you should be doing way before you have to write the CELPIP exam. This should be part of your regular everyday practice as you prepare, as you develop your skills in English.

Where was I? Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Oh, yeah. So if you find a section that is really hard for you, if you're struggling to even write a short summary of what you just read, that's an indicator to you that you need to go back and spend some time in that section.

Look for new words. That's what I was talking about before I got thirsty and had to take a drink. Find those words that were creating those holes in what the author was saying, and you couldn't quite figure out what the text was about because the words were getting in the way.

Pull out your dictionary and start doing some detective work around it. Maybe finding out what those words mean will help you to piece together what the author is talking about.

And if not, if the words aren't the thing that's in the way, if it's just the general ideas and concepts, maybe you put a star beside that paragraph or a giant question mark in the margin and then bring it, if you're working with a teacher or if you have friends who are more advanced in English than you, bring it to them and start talking about it.

Ask them if they could explain it to you so that you will figure it out, so that you'll be able to understand what's going on. And again, don't feel discouraged when this happens because it probably will happen.

Don't see it as I'm so stupid or don't see it as, Oh, I'm never going to get better in English. Don't listen to that negative self-talk because it's not true. Instead, see it as an opportunity for you to learn and to grow.

By taking that section that you're really struggling with and bringing it to someone that you trust, like a teacher or a friend who is more advanced in English than you, this is going to be a great way for you to grow and expand your English skills. It just is.

And maybe you're going to have to keep looking in order to find the answer. And that's okay. Maybe your friends might not be able to answer what you're looking for, but keep looking. Keep trying to find someone who can help you out with this.

I can remember the times in my university days, for example, when an idea wasn't connecting with me and I went to the teacher at the end. Like during their office hours, I would go in with their notes and I would ask them, okay, what is this all about?

And we would have wonderful discussions and would really help me one, to get to know the teacher in a better way, but also help me to understand the material more because I was able to ask all kinds of questions, all the questions that I had.

And they taught me that no question was a stupid one, and you should have that same idea in mind. The only question that's a dumb question is the one that you don't ask.

So yeah, if you get totally lost and you can't make create that summary that we're talking about, bring it to your teacher. Ask them to help you or bring it to a friend that you trust who's more advanced than you and ask them to help you through it.

So summaries are a great way for you to check in with yourself to see if you're following the main ideas of the writer. So let's just go through that one more time.

One of the best things that you could do, and this is a summary of today's podcast episode. One of the best ways that you can improve your reading skills is be is by becoming an active reader, and that means that you are interacting with the text. It means that you're interacting with the book. It means that you're interacting with the online article that you're reading and you are interacting by underlining or highlighting new words that you find. It means that you are underlining or circling ideas that you like or putting giant Xs next to ones that you don't like. And then in your notes, you're explaining why you're explaining why you disagree with the writer, you're explaining why you do agree with the writer.

Then in your notes, this is the most important part, you're writing a short summary of what you understood in that reading section today, be it a chapter or be it just a section, write a short summary of the main ideas that you pulled out from your reading.

And if by doing that you discover that you're kind of unsure of what they're trying to talk about, let that be an opportunity for you to seek help. Go to your teacher, if you have one, or go with a trusted friend and ask them to help you figure this out.

Again, don't see this as an opportunity to beat yourself up and say Terrible things about your English skills or about your intelligence levels, because that's not true.

This is an opportunity for you to grow and get better in English simply by asking questions.

And again, I'm going to repeat this note that I told you at the very beginning: These tips are not for the actual CELPIP exam. You won't have time to write summaries or engage with the text in the way that I was describing here.

This is a tip for developing your skills over time.

I've created several podcast episodes and blog posts about how to develop your reading skills in English, and if you're looking for more help on this topic, just check out today's show notes. There'll be links to all those episodes and the blog posts mentioned there. Thank you for listening to today's podcast episode. If you've enjoyed it, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and I'll see you next Tuesday. Bye bye