Hoofstuk 1. Back to English: reading strategies and building vocabulary GRATIS
Why reading strategies matter
When you read an English text, it does not help to just plough through it word by word. Good readers use strategies to make sense of a text even before they understand every word. Three key strategies you will sharpen this year are predicting, scanning, and using context to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words.
Predict before you read
First look at the heading, pictures and the first paragraph. Ask yourself: “What is this text likely to be about?” If the heading reads “The Storm That Changed Everything”, you can already predict that the text is about a natural disaster or a major change in someone’s life. This prediction gives you a framework to make the rest of the text easier to understand.
Scan for specific information
Scanning means you search quickly for a specific fact without reading every sentence - for example a date, a name or a place. If a question asks “Where did the accident happen?”, you do not need to slowly read through the whole text; you let your eyes glide quickly over the page until you come across a place word (such as “on the highway” or “at the school”).
Use context to infer unfamiliar words
You are not going to know every English word, and that is fine - even fluent English speakers sometimes get stuck on unfamiliar words. Look at the words around the unfamiliar word for clues. For example: “The dog was famished after the long walk, so it gulped down its food in seconds.” You might not know the word famished, but “gulped down its food in seconds” shows you it means something like very hungry. Synonyms, contrasts and examples in the same sentence are all clues that can help you.
Build your vocabulary with word families
A word family is a group of words that come from the same stem but are different parts of speech, for example: decide (verb), decision (noun), decisive (adjective) and decisively (adverb). If you know one word in a family, you can often guess the rest by looking at the ending (suffix). Words ending in -tion or -ment are usually nouns; words ending in -ive or -ful are usually adjectives; words ending in -ly are usually adverbs. These patterns will be repeated throughout the year, so that you start recognising them automatically.
Using all three strategies together
In practice, good readers use all three strategies at the same time: they predict before they read, scan for specific facts, and use context when they come across an unfamiliar word. The more you practise these skills, the faster and more confidently you will be able to understand English texts - stories, newspaper reports, advertisements and even exam questions.