Autor: Jimena Gonzalez Sánz.
Welcome back. We want to wish to all of you happy new year 2018! It is time for New Year’s resolutions and we hope one of them will be improving your English, so probably this is why you are here. If you have proposed to yourself to increase the time spent on reading this year, then you are lucky! Today we bring you some webpages where you can do so.
But first, some advices when you start reading.
- First things first, start with texts close to your interests; this will increase your motivation. You know what you like and it is best if you choose instead of being told what you should read. If you find it does not really provoke you, the urge to continue reading go for another one.
- Do not try very long texts if you are not accustomed to them it is best to start little by little.
- Start with texts close to your knowledge. Once you have a certain amount of vocabulary continue with texts with a little of difficulty for you. This will prove you are advancing despite what you might think.
- Do not over use the dictionary. If you find a difficult word, try to find the meaning by the context. If the word appears, so many times you do not understand what it is being said then use it.
Now you are prepared to face the possibilities we want to show you. The first one is : dreamreader.net a web page where you will be able to find free
short articles in English that will allow you to develop some reading practice and improve your reading understanding (and pronounciation too). Neil Millington a university English Foreign Language lecturer in Japan created this webpage a few years ago. You will be able to find articles under five main categories: easy English, interesting English, fun English, practical English and academic English. Inside each category, you will be able to find many articles with their audios and sometimes some worksheets. What we find most useful is the quizzes provided within each text. Normally they contain between three or ten short questions with multiple answers and the key is available in the printable version of the quizzes. So no more excuses to improve your reading skills.
In case you prefer short stories, the webpage englishinteractive.net that offers to the intermediate readers a selection of one hundred stories in the following link rong-chang . They also offer different activities you can carry out such as quizzes, comprehension activites (where you are asked to find a word or expression for a specific meaning), cloze activities (where you need to fill in the gaps), crosswords, wh- questions (where you need to find the answer from some provided ), tasks related to vocabulary and even dictations.
If you are more into books then we can offer you a couple of places: HathiTrust: with over 2,000,000 freely titles you can read online. And the Internet Archive offers over 12,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. It was founded in 1996 and here you can find from web pages to audio recordings as well as books, eBooks, videos and software programs. They also have a blog and you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook.
Jimena González Sanz.
