Thursday, March 7, 2013

I Find It Difficult to Read Long Stories

I have often heard from teachers that reading and writing are interconnected, and they have been encouraging students to read books for at least 20 minutes everyday in order to improve their writing skill.
That is why recently I have been reading an article out loud everyday on my own will. I have been continuing this for 22 days in a row. Last night, I read a story which is going to be used one of my assignments. The story was nine pages long and had 750 lines. My teacher had told us, "Compared to the previous stories we have learned so far, this story is pretty long." Yes, it was a very long story for me. It took me 45  minutes or so to finish reading it out loud. I know my reading skill is very weak considering my grammar skill, and I should overcome my weakness. After reading the story last night, I was shocked that I was not able to understand the contents of the story, and I just got tired from reading it. :(  If I had fully understood it, I would have enjoyed reading it though.
Today, I read it again, and  at the same time I drew and wrote down characters of the story on paper. In this way, I didn't have to be confused from many characters. I ended up being able to understand the contents of the story. I know I can't do the same thing every time I read stories, but now I need it because it takes time to improve my reading skill. The reason why it is difficult for me to understand stories is that I don't know enough vocabularies and am not familiar with English names. As my tutor had told me before, the key to improve English skill might be memorizing sentences and vocabularies. She had told me, "if I were you, I would memorialize every single sentence in an entire paragraph." The process of memorizing is not fun, but I clearly need to try it.

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