According to well-known linguist Stephen Krashen, people acquire a language when they hear and read messages they understand, ie, when they obtain "comprehensible input."
For this reason, he strongly advocates that students should do more recreational reading, defined as reading simply for fun without any forms of assessment to enhance and maintain their language ability.
Research has shown that students who do a great deal of recreational reading improve not only their reading fluency but also their writing style, grammar, spelling and punctuation.
After learning English for more than 15 years, I truly believe that recreational reading is one of the best ways to learn English. It is a critical factor in acquiring native-like proficiency because it gives learners essential comprehensible input.
Moreover, if English learners want to maintain their language proficiency, recreational reading is a practice they must continue throughout life.
I began graduate studies at a big university in the Midwest US in 1998. Graduate school required lots of academic reading and writing. I was afraid that my academic writing ability was not adequate, so I asked a US friend and doctoral student in psychology to proofread all my papers. He and I majored in different fields, so his corrections focused on my language mistakes. I kept the original drafts of my papers.
In the summer of 1999, I reviewed the drafts and corrections and was surprised to discover that I was still making many of the same mistakes. My professor told me that there were limits to how well a second-language learner can acquire the grammar of a target language by explicit learning through teachers' corrections. He suggested that I read extensively to improve my grammar and writing instead of just having my papers corrected. I have read English-language material from a wide variety of genres for both learning and pleasure since then.
I have been amazed to find over the years that my later writings contain many idiomatic English expressions. Those expressions were learned implicitly through my recreational reading. I did not learn them from textbooks.
Reading for pleasure can help English learners not only extend their vocabulary, review and ingrain grammar, and learn to write and speak idiomatically, it can also increase their understanding of cultures in English-language countries and expand their horizons. For these reasons, I encourage my friends to read popular novels. Personally, I enjoy the works of two US novelists, John Grisham and Stephen King. Both are prolific writers who have won international acclaim.
In addition, most of their works are often adapted into box-office movies and translated into Chinese, making them more easily accessible in Taiwan. Most English learners do not have the opportunity to live in English-speaking countries for an extended period of time.
Reading popular novels can allow learners to feel that they are receiving part of the linguistic and cultural exposure that they would get by living in an English-speaking country. Although I lived in the US for quite some time, I have learned more about the US legal system from John Grisham's novels -- Grisham was a lawyer before becoming a writer. Not only has recreational reading enhanced my level of English proficiency, it has also increased my knowledge of US culture.
Many successful English learners have one thing in common: They do a lot of pleasure reading. Reading for fun also motivates them to continue learning English.
Kao Shih-fan is an assistant professor at Jinwen Institute of Science and Technology.
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