Why Extensive Reading Doubles Your Student's Vocabulary?

From long time ago, people have wondered what the importance of reading is, and there may be many reasons for that question. We can say that, with reading, you have a powerful tool to be competence in today’s society, that you can develop your mind and imagination or that you can discover new things. In this work I will talk about the different benefits of extensive readings, and also I’m going to give my personal opinion about the importance of it for students of a foreign language what do extensive readings give to students and how do we, as teachers, can teach and make use of extensive readings in our classes.

Nowadays, it is rarely seen one textbook for teaching a foreign language includes extensive readings and is so common that teachers teach only following those textbooks. This cause the classes to be all the same, the same textbooks with short texts, difficult words, so many exercises just to practice grammar or vocabulary and most important, with texts that may be not interesting to students.

Some other times students do not understand what they are reading or they do not comprehend it because they don’t really like what they are reading about and this can cause students to get distracted while reading and take so many pauses between the lectures.

We most know that there are several types of reading, and each one has its purpose. Two types of reading are Intensive and Extensive readings. The purpose of intensive reading is to be concentrate on the grammar, to look inside the text and to make students practicing specific strategies or skills; and if the text is difficult the students tend to read once and then twice one same part to understand what the teacher asked for. On the other hand, extensive readings are used to make students reading interesting texts, reading enjoyable things.

It is not wrong to teach only based on the course book, because maybe sometimes the course book will introduce student in a new topic and then we can use an extensive reading to give more vocabulary related to that topic and consolidate the knowledge about it helping. In order to improve student’s learning skills and vocabulary we should teach, in addition to the course book, extensive readings, but we must know that there correct ways to do it. First we can start doing extensive reading with our students at least one day of the week, with a basic level of lecture and with something that students can enjoy.

It is important to know which level of lecture use with students in order to make and extensive reading helpful. One way to know which level of extensive reading use is using graded readers or stories written for different levels of students. The level of the lectures need to be the right one so the students can comprehend more words, read faster, understand better, enjoy the reading and be interested on reading more. In addition to the level, we need to be careful of using material designed for

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