Why do you need to read beyond OET exam papers and textbooks?
What’s the point of reading widely when you are preparing for an exam?
Reading a lot of easy material helps you to recognise patterns in English. Let’s review the stages of learning a language.
1. Word Recognition and Vocabulary Building:
Understanding individual words is the foundation. An adult typically uses around 3,000 words in daily conversations, and expanding this vocabulary is crucial for broader comprehension.
2. Pattern Recognition:
Grasping how words fit together to convey meaning is key. This includes understanding sentence structures, the use of different tenses, and the formulation of questions and negations.
3. Application and Communication:
The ultimate goal is to accurately and flexibly use newly acquired words within known patterns to express specific ideas or thoughts.
Reading more and especially reading longer texts is a good way to get exposure to words in different settings. This helps you learn patterns. For example: do we say ‘The patient complained of backache’ or ‘The patient complained to backache’?
In language teaching, tutors often have no easy explanation. Why do we say ‘of’ and not ‘to’ in that pattern… The pattern is just a fact of life! But the patterns are usually not complicated to learn as long as you get enough exposure.
If you read a lot, you’ll know that the pattern ‘speak to…’ is usually followed by someone. For example, ‘I spoke to the charge nurse’… ‘I am speaking to my boss next week’. You are not likely to write ‘I complained to a backache’ because it will sound wrong in your head.
This process of pattern recognition works because our brains are a bit lazy! We use what we’ve seen already. Language learners need to ‘feed’ their brains plenty of examples of real English, and there is a special magic about reading something enjoyable and interesting.
When students start to develop a sense of ‘this just doesn’t sound right’ then, they are on the way to sounding more natural in English. What a wonderful feeling!
