How can I improve my English? This is a common question most of us ask ourselves. The first thing to do is to start reading. Yes, it’s as simple as that. Reading is an active process where one uses the brain in more than one way – imagining the scene they are reading about, comprehending the text, and sometimes even forming an opinion about the text read. Hence, reading is a very essential and a key step towards improving English.
When it comes to reading, there is a world of material available. Therefore, how do you make your pick? Again, the answer is very simple – grab a newspaper in the morning and get going with our reading exercises!
There is a reason why English tutors world-over lay stress upon the importance of reading the newspaper as a means of improving English.
Tips to improve your English via newspaper reading:
• Boosts interpersonal communication: The English used in newspapers is such that even a layman can read and understand the news, for that is the purpose of a newspaper! While the English used in newspapers is crisp and grammatically correct, it is also very simple and almost like spoken English, and that is why one can pick many phrases and words that can be used in day-to-day communication.
• Learn grammar along the way: One thing you can blindly rely on newspapers for is that they will always be grammatically sound. A news item, before going to print, is checked, re-checked, and edited a number of times so that there is no room for any grammatical error. Whether it is punctuation, tenses, or sentence formation, nothing is more accurate than a daily English newspaper.
• An informative and fun way to learn: Ever tried learning from a grammar book, or tried mugging up new words from a vocabulary book? Gets boring pretty fast right. The reason is that our brain tends to tire easily when you are actively trying to learn something. However, reading a newspaper is fun! There are news stories, new information, and even gossip to keep you hooked – and you pick up so many new words and writing styles along the way!
• Something new every day: When reading a newspaper, set a target for each day. One day, study how first, second and third-person accounts are used. Another day, you can learn how tenses are used and then study sentence formation another time, so on and so forth. In addition, because the reading material will be so diverse, you will not get bored of it. Even if you do not intentionally maintain a daily basis target, you will learn a lot through reading the news articles, like being to the point, forming crisp and meaningful sentences and how to present information using the minimum necessary words – now isn’t that what effective communication is all about?
If you develop the habit of reading the newspaper every day, you will tend to free newspapers:
