The Importance of Reading and Listening

One of the fastest ways to learn English is by imitating other people so that you are able to speak like the native speakers. When you speak in your mother tongue, grammar and words used form naturally into correct sentences. The reason is your brain intuitively uses sentences that you have already learnt, read or heard.

In order to help your brain develop language intuition, reading and listening becomes important. By putting lots of sentences into your brain, it will then imitate these sentences and reproduce them to express your thoughts and feelings in speaking and writing. Through the process of reading and listening, your brain also picks up useful vocabulary, phrases, grammar rules as well as correct pronunciations automatically.


Reading

When reading, the focus should be on analysing the sentence structures. For example, try to notice any new words or phrases that look different or used in an interesting way. Other things to pay attention to includes collocations, articles etc. Take a look at the paragraph below where interesting words and phrases are highlighted.


Choosing the referee was easy enough: we'd picked Tom. Tom is top of the class and we're not mad about him, but we can't hit him because he wears glasses, and all that is a pretty good combination for a referee. Anyway no one wanted Tom in their team because he's not much good at. However, we ran into a spot of difficulty when Tom said he does not have a whistle.


What To Read

Reading should be a fun activity, therefore reading interesting contents is highly recommended. Interesting content can be anything from comics to novels to detective stories. In fact, comics are some of the best material for learning simple, informal phrases.


Listening

The benefits of listening include helping to improve pronunciation and conversational skills. When listening to a native speaker, you will become familiar with the sounds of the language. Therefore it’s a good idea to listen to some content repeatedly. This way, you will remember useful sentences or even the whole story or passage. Then you should practise repeating them by imitating the speaker’s pronunciation. Soon, you will start to use that these sentences, words and phrases naturally in your conversation. So, try to do some listening every single day.


What to Listen to?

Listen to content that is interesting and meaningful to you. And if the voice of the speaker is soothing and pleasant, you have the added benefit of enjoying to the contents.