How to improve your reading skills in 5 steps

1. Always make time to read

Reading for fun can be done anywhere. You could take a fun book out on a bus, in bed or at the office, and you can enjoy it.

However, if you’re reading to improve your comprehension, you need to focus and study.

This means you need to make a special time for this reading. Making time for your reading will let you focus well without risk of being interrupted. This time should be quiet, and you should avoid being distracted.

You should try to spend at least 30 minutes every day on focused reading. That’s how to improve your reading skills seriously and successfully. The more you read, the more you’ll improve.

2. Read the right books

If you dislike science fiction, you might not want to read a book about a man stuck on Mars. When you’re choosing books (and other texts) to read, keep two things in mind:

• What you’re interested in

• Your reading level

Whenever you can, you should read things that you enjoy. You should also choose books that are at an English level just above the one you’re most comfortable with. You want to challenge yourself just enough to learn new things, but not enough to get frustrated with your reading.

3. Ask yourself questions while reading and after reading

Learning how to read English books is about more than just reading the words!

There are a few things you can do before, during and after reading to help you better understand the text.

Before you read, browse the text. That means you should look over the text quickly without actually reading every word.

Take some time after you read too, to browse again and summarize what you remember. Try to quickly say or write a few sentences that describe what the text was about.

Thinking about what you read will show you how much of it you really understood, and help you figure out if you still have questions

4. Read it again

The poet Ezra Pound says that with books, “no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.”

Sometimes reading a text just once isn’t enough to understand it. This is true if you’re reading something difficult, or even if you’re not—reading something more than once can help you understand it much better.

Re-reading is great for those times when you read the words but can’t get them to make sense. It’s also great for finding things you might have missed the first time. If there are any new words in the text, you’ll see them again every time your read again, helping you remember them.

In short, reading things again is great!

5. Read many types of texts

Today we don’t just read books and newspapers. We read blogs, emails, Tweets and texts. The more you read anything in English, the better you’ll get at the language.

Don’t just read books and news. Read anything and everything! Find a magazine that you enjoy, follow some interesting people or websites on Facebook, or visit a blog you like reading.