Reading Advice
The Power of Words
Reading is not only expanding your knowledge about one specific thing; it will help you to develop a lot of different skills. Actually, any skill that you want, literally anything. You can read about how to cook or rollerskate, how to get a good job, which places are the best for shopping, or where you can travel next summer. These are quite interesting topics, right? However, when I'm talking about reading, I don't mean just grabbing information from the text. You can focus on techniques the writer uses, and then use them yourself. Definitely, it will help you to read and write faster, and it may change your world outlook.
Reading in foreign languages will help you to adapt in your new school when you leave Russia and study abroad. Moreover, It will help you to improve your vocabulary, find new linguistic and structural techniques. This will make your speech beautiful, grammatically correct and understandable. If you know the language, you can always find new friends or acquaintances abroad. Furthermore, you are always able to improvise in a lesson or an exam without really learning things by heart - it will help you to pass the exam easily. That will make your life easier in general, because the majority of information you get is written down.
Now, let's focus on the way it will make your life easier. When your speech is correct and understandable, people usually support your opinion more, so you are able to express yourself, convey your ideas, and persuade people. This is useful not only for school; this is a skill that you will have to use in your everyday routine. Knowing English will always be useful. Think about your future life and things you are going to do after you finish your studies. You will certainly need this for your future job.
As you study in an international school, you have an opportunity to know English as your first language, (or even better than somenative speakers!). Don't lose it.
In the end, I want to ask you the only question: do you want to try to read more or not?
By Anna Masalova
Reading Is Important!!
People say that, nowadays, children close to being teenagers don't read at all. They sat that not a single teacher or parent could change something; that children have no interests apart from playing video games and watching movies. So this is going to be a little life-connected story which might help you in the future.
Have you heard of Benjamin Zephaniah? No? Well then here is a little bit of his life story.
Benjamin Zepheniah was born dyslexic - he had issues with reading and writing. If people without learning disabilities nowadays could read a 300-word text in 5 minutes, then that would be a big challenge for Benjamin Zepheniah. Well, he didn't give up, he did his best to try and achieve his goals. In 1985 Benjamin Zepheniah published his first book ‘Dread Affair’, and didn't stop there. I'm sure if someone with learning disabilities was able to read and write books and lots more, then you are also able to!
Reading is very important for people who want to get ready for life after school, as well as for people who want to pass the IGCSE exams. For life after school, it's important because, to apply to a good university, you will definitely need high knowledge in how to read, analyse, and compare texts. Meanwhile, in year 9, reading is also very important. Knowing how to quickly read, skim and scan texts very quickly is going to help very much in the upcoming exams!
In years 9-10 i was never able to motivate myself to read. I probably only got to ‘Diary of the Wimpy Kid’, which is very sad, and I started reading kind of late but I had to work hard to being able to get all the skills, which people in year 11 achieved without working hard. So my suggestion would be to start reading and analysing texts/books to not remind yourself in the last year before the exams, and make your life 10 times easier.
Overall, reading is a very important skill, which will be very helpful and useful nearly everywhere in this generation. You don't notice it, but the amount you read per day is more than 2 hours a day for interests, and even more for personal pleasure (insta, blogs, text messages etc) but both are really different. By reading a book, you will expand your mindset and vocabulary, which you won't quite get from reading blogs.
Reading is very useful in life, and everyone needs reading. The only difference between people who read books, and people who do not read books is that some don't see any point in reading, and some could motivate themselves to read more and understand the point behind reading, and knowing that they will need it in life after school.
By RAMZIN AMIRASLANOV
The Power of English
An integral part of studying in a university abroad is knowledge of the English language. Being able to extensively learn about a subject in English involves being capable of thinking, analyzing and fluently communicating via speech or text. However, you should already be investing time and effort to be able to get to that point in the first place.
Apart from university preparation, learning English provides you with the opportunity to communicate with (according to a 2019 study conducted by Ethnologue) a whopping 1.27 billion people across the world, which is more than 1/7 of the entire human population. This only emphasizes the significance of investing time into learning English right now, while you are young and have years of time ahead of you before you are subjected to the scope of the real world.
Being fluent in another language also provides access to original versions of various artistic and scientific works. In the context of English, this will allow you to interpret a large fraction of literature as intended by the writer, without any translational distortion. This will grant you access to a massive range of information, even when you are not writing in English, again proving that learning English is a worthwhile investment into your future.
One way of improving is trying to read about your interests in English. If you already tend to English as a primary language for conducting research and leisure reading - you are at an advantage. However, there is always room for improvement - consider, for example, exploring beyond your interests simply for the sake of diversifying your language skills and maybe even finding a new hobby associated with English to further accelerate your learning rate.
Finding informational resources when trying to diversify your range of reading topics can sometimes be challenging. An interesting option that might work for you as well as it did for me is reading Google Chrome recommended articles and using Wikipedia’s random article option. Both of these methods have given me opportunities to read about all sorts of interesting subjects that I never cared about or didn’t even know existed and. As a result, I improved my language skills by spending a few minutes after reading on translating unfamiliar vocabulary and analyzing the text’s structural features.
In conclusion, English will eventually become a fundamental part of your life in many aspects. Adopting English from your early days will help you cohesively implement it into your professional life, grant you the ability to fluently communicate with other speakers and open up before you a whole universe of original literary works.
By Michael Anisimov
Reading? Video Games?
There are different subjects in school, one of them (and really the most valuable one) is English. Most people in schools don’t want to read books, because it’s “hard” and “complicated”, but let's look at how it will help you and how to make it better.
First, as everybody knows, English is an international language, so you will need it to connect with other people, especially at work, where it’s necessary to communicate with other employees well. You can take most of the necessary language for communication from… Books! Even if it sounds strange, storybooks can teach you much better than student books and teachers together! As we can see from different research, people who read a lot (and not magazines, but novels and fiction books, especially with their family and for fun) get better exam results much better and have an easier life in university. Books provide you with a lot of high quality techniques which you can note down to remember and later use them in exams and speak with people better.
Video games can also help you to learn English. I know what you’re thinking: "How?!” Simply. While most of you, my dear readers, play video games, it’s a good way to learn English! In most games there are dialogues and to make them more “real”, developers use different techniques. Alliteration, connotation, hyperboles are just a small part of them. You can learn how to use these techniques by their own and in combinations. Also. through dialogues, you will improve your level of English in all directions (speaking, listening, writing, reading). This is only one out of a lot of ways how video games can improve your English.
While there are a lot of ways to improe your English, reading is one of (if not) the most efficient. You can learn language a lot while getting huge amounts of useful knowledge from books and in-game texts. So read a lot and progress a lot in all directions!
By Leon Filippov
For more articles about video games and how they can improve your English level, go to the Arts and Culture section of the website.