From Successfull English mainly:
- The importance of reading. Reading has awesome (very impressive) power to improve your English. Reading will improve your vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension, your writing, spelling, and more.
- Reading for fun. Your English will improve more if you relax and enjoy what you’re reading. Read for fun and watch your English improve! Read for recreation, for your own enjoyment.
- What to read (1). Choose books, stories, or articles that are easy to understand. Your English improves when you understand what you are reading. You should recognize at least 90-95% of the words you read. “No more than 5 unknown, or unfamiliar, words per page.”
- What to read (2). Read several books, stories, or articles by the same author or on the same subject. This is called narrow reading, and it helps make your reading more effective and efficient. Read good English translations of books you are already familiar with.
- How fast you should read. You should be able to read at least 80-100 words per minute. If you have to read slower than that, you will probably have trouble understanding what you are reading.
- How to read. Read without stopping. It is not important or helpful to stop and look up every word you don’t know. Try to figure out the unknown words from the context. Look them up in a dictionary just a last resort. Read the sentence or paragraph again, two or three times if you think it is important.
- How often you should read. It is very important to read or to talk in English every day, even for a short time. Read as much as possible! The more you read, the more your English will improve. "If you read 20 minutes a day at 100 words per minute for 2 years, you will acquire the 5,000 most common words in the English language (90% of the words you need for normal conversation and reading)."
Some tips from Antimoon:
- Why you need to start reading on your own. "Before you can start speaking and writing in English, you have to learn how things are said in English. You do this by reading and listening to correct English sentences of other people (ideally, native speakers)."
- "Intensity: You need 1000s of phrases to speak English fluently. To be able to use thousands of phrases, you must read tens of thousands of phrases, because you will forget a lot of what you read."
- "Motivation: You need to start reading on your own not just because it is effective, but also because it is so damn motivating. When you read on your own, you read something you chose yourself, something you really find interesting, rather than something your teacher told you to read."
- "Authenticity: I believe it's important to learn from real American and British sources instead of resources prepared especially for English learners."
- How to read English texts if you want to improve your English. "Reading everywhere: carry a book with you everywhere you go", "... you can write down all the interesting sentences, or you can underline them in the book with a pencil. This way, you can handle these sentences later". More in that website: Special techniques: reading by content and pause and think.
- What to read: "Something fun, challenging, but not too challenging. "When choosing a book, choose one with modern language and lots of dialog." "Don't read books written in obsolete English".