Develop a reading habit in 5 simple steps

Today I want to talk about reading, why reading is important and specifically how it relates to language learning, but more than that, how do we develop good reading habits? I love books. I'm surrounded by books. I've got books all over my house. I can't say I've read them all. I've read a lot of them. Sometimes I buy a book and I read it later on. I use books a lot for learning the languages that I'm learning. Reading is good for the brain. Research shows that it is very good for our cognitive functions. It creates new connections in the brain. It's not something that humans did for most of our existence, but it's very good for us. It's a big marker of professional success, of academic success, but not everyone likes to read. And some people don't have that reading habit. We hear a lot these days that young people aren't reading, that reading is declining. People don't read as well as they used to. So I want to delve into that a little bit. I googled, are young people reading less today in a variety of languages? Swedish, German, Japanese, French, Italian, Turkish even. In fact, I googled it in Turkish and found an article which I then imported into LingQ so I can read that and improve my Turkish while reading. What I discovered is that while there is a lot of sort of alarmist, you know, hand wringing about how reading skills are declining. In fact, the picture is a little more differentiated depending on how we look at it. First of all, there's always the assumption that at some period in the past, everyone was a great reader. That's not the case. In fact, probably more people read today than a long time ago. But even compared to the 50s, 60s, 70s, people read in different ways. Reading is not declining. You'll see some of these studies from Sweden and Italy and elsewhere show that young people are reading more, but they read a greater variety of things. Our world, our information world has become more varied. One of the interesting observations was that young people don't like the kind of books that are suggested to them by teachers or others. Also, it seems that in most countries, young people read more and then they start to lose that reading habit because there are more distractions. However, in my view, if you have been an avid reader as a very young person, you now have that ability. You can go back to it and you can rekindle those reading habits, which we will get into later on. One of the interesting things I came upon was a website called Wattpad, which creates sort of a learning community online where people can recommend books to each other, people can write for each other. So I joined. I thought I would try it out. I'm not sure I'll spend much time there. I put nonfiction as my area of interest and up popped a bunch of books that I have absolutely no interest in. Now, granted, this is a younger demographic. Apparently, young people are more interested in things related to fantasy or I don't know, science fiction, whatever. Not my interest. I have to kind of find a Wattpad that corresponds to my age group and my kind of interest. But the key there is if you can provide young readers, middle aged readers with things of interest to them, they're going to read. One of the big issues in reading has been the so-called reading wars, like what is the best way to teach reading? This is a war that has been raging since the 50s, if not longer. And it is this sort of disagreement as to whether kids should be taught phonics, in other words, to sound out the words based on the value of the letters, or should they be taught some kind of a reading strategy based on remembering words, memorizing words, guessing at the meaning of words. In other words, reading the whole language. Personally, I don't understand why there is a dispute. I don't see how you can learn to read without learning to decode the letters, what the letters stand for. And I don't know how you can become a good reader if you don't read a lot. In other words, absorb the whole language and develop a sense of fluency of reading and reading a lot. It's a bit like speaking a language. You have to speak a lot to speak well, to read well. You have to read a lot. So I really don't see why there is a dispute there. At any rate, this dispute has been raging for 100 years. And yet, you know, educators or politicians continue to complain that reading skills are declining despite the tremendous amount of research and theories about how best to teach reading and so forth and so on. It still comes back down to developing that reading habit. When it comes to decoding, of course, decoding is a much bigger issue in some languages than in others. If the language is written in a way that we call transparent, such as Spanish or Turkish, where there's literally you can read any word, even if you don't know the word, because the relationship between how the word is written and how it's pronounced is very consistent, then those languages are easier and more transparent, where that relationship is not quite so consistent as in English. Notorious example, Danish, as far as I'm concerned, Arabic and Persian, then it's it's not obvious. And we end up having to try to memorize the word because it's difficult, at least for me, say, reading Persian and Arabic, difficult to sound out that word if I haven't seen it before. And I think to some extent, readers rely on a combination of decoding and remembering the word. If you have learned to decode English and you see the combination of letters O-U-G-H, if you don't know the word, you don't know if that's rough, though, bow, through, you have to know the word. So it's always a combination of decoding and developing some sort of fluency through memorizing words once you've seen them often enough, again, to become a better reader, you have to read a lot. You become more fluent in terms of decoding. You become more fluent in terms of recognizing words. Maybe the bottom line there is that we have to learn to enjoy reading. If we enjoy reading, we will become good readers. That means allowing learners or readers to choose what they want to read and also allowing them to choose the form in which they want to read might be comic books. It might be reading online, which more and more young people are doing. But any form of reading is, in fact, building up that capability to read. So let's look at how we develop a good reading habit. And I'm going to leave a link to an article by James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, where he talks about developing a reading habit. I think the philosophy of atomic habits is very applicable to reading. Every little bit that we read is good. Atomic habits talks about the importance of not reaching for the sky, but developing good habits, small habits that cumulatively benefit us. So we should be encouraged to read wherever we can in whatever form. Even little bits of reading are all positive. However, there are other things that I do. For example, I always have a book by my bedside because my favorite time to read is before going to sleep. And James Clear mentions this. There is a real benefit in having sort of a reading time during the day. In my case, it's a half hour before I fall asleep. I may read at other times, but I know I'm going to read before going to sleep. And so if we have a reading time, it could be after breakfast. It could be at any time. Then that's going to encourage us to read. It's going to help develop that reading habit. Another thing to have a reading habit, you need to be curious about things. But curiosity is developed in a variety of different ways. For example, in my case, audio books help trigger an interest in reading the same book. It doesn't replace reading. It's another form of getting that information in. But once I've been listening to the book, I actually want to read the book so that I can flip back and forth in the book and reread certain parts of it and so forth, which is more difficult to do with an audio book. Also, when I learn Turkish or Persian or Arabic, now I'm motivated to read a book about the history of the Arabs or the history of Iran or the history of the Turks. So these are all things that connect with each other. I don't think that the availability of electronic media and audio books and e-books necessarily discourages people from reading. And I think the statistics bear that out, that despite some alarmist statements, and maybe it varies from country to country, but I don't think reading in terms of volume of words read is actually declining. But I think the form that that reading takes is changing. And so while all the different kinds of reading that we do online and elsewhere and mixing in audio books may distract from reading. However, maybe that word distraction is important. In other words, we do need a certain degree of concentration. A big advantage of reading on paper is that you are less likely to be distracted by your iPhone or your Twitter or your email or things of that nature. And if you have problems, if you have, you know, difficulty shutting off your iPhone. My son told me that his kids, grandchildren who live in England, they have some kind of an iPhone box or something where they lock up their iPhone for three hours so they cannot access it for that period of time. So any kind of strategy which limits distractions may also encourage you to read more or to stay focused and concentrated while you're reading. And finally, a word about reading and language learning. For much of my life, reading has been my main way of learning languages. When I was learning Mandarin Chinese back in 1968, I spent more time reading than doing anything else. There wasn't the availability of audio and certainly not video in those days. And so I was reading books, books with glossaries. But I was reading books. If I hear a language, if I have my lesson with my Turkish tutor and he introduces a new word to me, I have no hope of remembering that word if I don't see it written down. And that's why I get a report later on from my tutor where he writes out the words and phrases that I struggled with or that he introduced while we were talking. I need to read it. I need to see it. I need that combination of audio and text. Reading is, to my mind, the best way to accumulate vocabulary. Listening helps with vocabulary and listening particularly helps you to get into speaking. But to accumulate vocabulary, passive vocabulary, which you can eventually turn into active vocabulary, reading is the key. Reading is very important to increase our vocabulary, which, as I've said many, many times, is the key to improving in your whatever language you're learning. And of course, vocabulary and word count is at the core of our language learning philosophy at LingQ. And just a final note. It's surprising to me how many systems for language acquisition don't focus on reading. Stephen Krashen, of course, is a great proponent of voluntary reading as a way to acquire language. And I consider him the foremost expert on language acquisition today. Reading is so important that even while we are surrounded by YouTube videos on learning languages and podcasts about learning languages, if a transcript isn't made available, I find those much less useful. So in every way, reading is fundamental to language improvement. It's something that obviously I can't do while driving the car, but it's something that I combine with my listening, which I am able to do while doing other tasks. So with that, if you want to improve in your language and you recognize the importance of reading but don't have that reading habit, first of all, I left the link to James Clear's suggestions on developing a reading habit. And I hope that this little talk might encourage you to become a better reader and more motivated to develop a reading habit. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.