Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2018

Enjoying a good book

Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash Students always know they should read more to improve their English and so they tell me they are going to start reading books. “Not books”, I say, “articles. Short articles. Choose a topic you’re interested in and read about it in an article for 15 minutes a day.” Why no books? Various reasons. Books are generally based on one story that may or may not interest you. If it doesn’t interest you, you might give up , and all that time and effort given to the first 43 pages is lost. Another disadvantage of books is that they contain lots of long descriptions. They are full of useless, uncommon adjectives that students painstakingly look up in the dictionary and then spend ages learning. When it takes 10 minutes to read the first page, you might easily be put off . Articles, I always felt, were a better option. Short, relevant to your interests, no unnecessarily decorative language. Definitely the way to go! And so, taking my own adv