How to read in your target language
Turns out, it's not like learning to read as a kid.
Happy March! It’s officially reading month here at How Do You Say…!
Did you know there are four skills that make up our ability to speak a language? They’re reading, listening, speaking and writing.
Since reading is a full quarter of that, it makes sense that we should spend a fair bit of time talking about how it works, and the role of reading when it comes to language learning.
But that’s not the main reason we’re dwelling on it now. After all, we could have picked any of the four.
We need to talk about reading because it’s one of the two mediums of input available to you. In other words, it’s a crucial fuel for acquisition. And, better yet, it’s a fuel you can consume at your own pace, based on your own interests, to your heart’s content!
But reading comes with its own challenges. To get past them and profit from what reading can do for you, it helps to know a bit about how reading works specifically within the context of second language acquisition. And that’s exactly what we’ll be exploring today.
Like with most things when it comes to language learning, it’s probably unsurprising to hear that there’s a big difference between learning to read in your first language and in a second language.
When you learn to read in your first language, you’ve already got a well-developed representation of the language in your head. All those words you’ve heard from your family, environment, television (or, we guess, YouTube… kids these days!), that’s all been building your representation.
Learning to read in this case is mostly a matter of attaching the stuff in your head to the stuff on the page, and learning to do that with speed and accuracy.
We know that mental representation of a language and ability to read the language with speed and accuracy are not the same thing because there are people who can do one but not the other.
So let’s refer to the ability to read with accuracy, speed, and ease as the skill of reading.
When it comes to your second language, you’re generally learning to read at the same time as building up your mental representation of the language.
Often you’re building up that representation, in whole or in part, through reading.
This means that you’re doing two jobs at once: you’re building your mental representation of the language AND you’re learning the skill of reading.
And if you’re learning to read in a totally new alphabet? That’s a whole other kettle of fish, and we’ll talk about the complexities of different writing systems in another issue.
Of course, what you can take in as input (remember it has to be comprehensible) depends to a certain extent on your skill at reading.
So we have a chicken and egg scenario: you need the skill of reading to get access to written input and develop your mental representation of the language, but you don’t have a sufficient mental representation of the language to be able to read very much, at least at the start.
How do we solve this problem? Well, you have two options:
Read Early. Learn to read while you’re building up your mental representation of the language. Avoid frustration and wasted effort by curating your reading material carefully so that it’s at just the right level.
Read Later. Replicate the first-language order. Start by building up your mental representation of the language purely through auditory input before attempting to learn to read.
Each of these strategies has its advantages and disadvantages, and each is appropriate for different scenarios.
The Read Early strategy is what you normally encounter in language teaching. You learn to read alongside your development of the mental representation of the language, which occurs through exposure to input. In this strategy, the material you read functions as input even in the early stages.
If you’re learning an ancient language, the Read Early strategy is (almost) the only game in town. We say “almost” because there are now movements in ancient language teaching such as the Living Latin movement, which aims to teach Latin as a spoken language. But otherwise, students of ancient or historical languages may not have a choice between Read Early and Read Later.
However, if you’re learning a modern spoken language, you will have a choice. Since the Read Early strategy is the default, it’s easiest to talk about situations when you might not want to use it.
The Read Early strategy can be challenging in the following situations:
When not much level-appropriate reading material is available.
When the language’s writing system is challenging to learn. This is especially true when the way words are written doesn’t reflect the way they sound, as is the case with Chinese characters.
In these situations, you may want to consider adopting a Read Later strategy. The Read Later strategy is based on the idea that it’s easier to develop skill in reading when you’ve already built up your representation of the language.
In other words, since reading is a matter of associating visual patterns with language structures, it’s easier to do when you already know the language structures.
Of course, you don’t have to stick strictly to either strategy! Maybe you want to pursue what is basically a Read Early strategy, but you take inspiration from the Read Later strategy by practising reading using only easy material that is well within your ability.
The bottom line is this: developing reading skill is a different thing than building up your mental representation of the language.
Developing your representation of the language requires not practice but exposure to comprehensible input (yes, we’re talking about it again!) – that is, input where you understand the message but which contains some elements you don’t already know.
Reading skill, by contrast, is developed by practice: reading lots of easy material (see p40). For some languages, you can find this easy material in the form of graded readers, texts which are aimed at language learners and written with a limited vocabulary.
If you can’t find a graded reader in your language, you can make your own reading material by reading the same text over and over again, bringing that text to the point where you totally comprehend it. Then you can use it as you would use a graded reader, and read it to develop your speed and accuracy.
That’s all from us for this week. Join us next time, where we’ll talk about two different styles of reading in your target language, what they can do for you, and when you might want to use them.