Reading newspapers for language learners
Language learners often teach us about difficult-to-understand areas of learning and life and ask for tips and guides to help them learn.
As mentioned in many other articles on language learning, there are no tips or tricks. The more you invest, the better it will be. And if your goal is to read at the native speaker level, you should read what the native speaker reads. If you are a 22-year-old college graduate, you must be reading at that level in a foreign language. And you don’t get there by reading a textbook about that language. Read books, articles, and textbooks to get there, not about languages.
When analyzing this latest email, students said they had difficulty reading, especially when choosing the best english newspaper in India.
Obviously, reading is reading. On some level, reading a newspaper is no different than reading a novel or a short story.
If you are reading a novel or a short story, you should be able to read the newspaper. But when I ask this student, he probably doesn’t read one novel a month in English. If so, the newspaper reading will come.
Therefore, the problem is not the reading or the newspaper itself. The problem is the lack of practice.
I have never taken a course called “Newspaper Reading” in English. I just started reading the newspaper. And at first I had to learn to deal with the language, structure and composition of newspaper writing, but no one taught me or you. It just came to us. The same happened with German or Spanish newspapers, which I can read in the same way as in English. Nobody taught me, Gunther or Pablo.
What I have said many times in the article is that when you start learning a foreign language, you are not an idiot. You are not starting with an empty brain. One of the reasons it takes babies three years to learn their mother tongue is that they are also learning what a language is and how it works. You know everything and much more. Babies don’t know that there is such a thing as grammar. You need to learn all the parts of the vocabulary. A 7-year-old may not know the words “population, economy, government, referendum, currency” in her native language. So, reading a newspaper in his native language would be difficult for him, so reading a foreign newspaper would be difficult for him.
Adults in developed countries who have at least a high school or college education should already be able to read newspapers in their native language. At that time, reading a newspaper in a foreign language is just a matter of vocabulary.
In fact, there are different uses and writings of the word. And newspapers have a different style than other types of writing. But you only read, read and understand them.
But the problem with most students is that they have not read novels or stories. Most students must accept that practice is needed. They have to read, read, stumble, fall, and reread until they understand.
I didn’t like reading English newspapers until I was in my early twenties. But at that time he had read countless books in English and had 16 years of education. I had to read a foreign newspaper in college, so I started reading the newspaper. Then I learned to read English newspapers to help me understand foreign newspapers.
One of the problems for Khmer students in particular is that there are very few documents available in Khmer. American students have touched newspapers, magazines, novels, reference books, poetry, plays, encyclopedias, diaries, biographies, textbooks, comics … most bears don’t have this exhibit.
If they haven’t read it in their native language, how can they read it in a foreign language?
And I don’t just choose the Khmer. Sure, these styles are not available in Khmer, but even in Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese education, where many of these styles exist, students may not have played them. For example, a Taiwanese college student said he had never written a research treatise for 12 years in elementary school.
But then they were asked to do it in English in their ESL class.
Currently, I have a Thai friend named M who is studying in the United States. He’s been there for three years, studying English full-time, but he doesn’t get high enough scores to enroll in an American community college on the TOEFL test. Although I graduated from university in Thailand, Thai education lags far behind Western education. And in developed countries, American community colleges are the easiest postsecondary schools to enroll in.
