How to Improve your English Reading Skills through the KWL Method

One of the best ways to improve English is to read books as often as possible

 

Have you ever struggled to understand English-written text? Are there any things that are very difficult for you to read? Maybe you have to read something in English and you really don't understand what's happening in the story. Or maybe you're in university and you're taking a very hard course and you can't read the textbook because it's really difficut and you don't know what's happening. There are a lot of things to read in English such as newspaper, internet sources, magazines, journals, and even an English test.

 

These things can be very difficult to read. This is exactly where the KWL technique comes in. Although I wouldn't recommend using this technique on the actual exam, I think it's great for your practice tests. When a lot of people pick up a book, they open it up and start reading right away, and then close the book, and a lot of times they don't really remember anything they read or they don't understand what they read. So it's a lot of wasted time.

 

 

Reading is pretty much like doing some exercise

 

I like to think of reading how I think of exercise, which I think so many people do on a regular basis to keep in a good shape. Reading is a lot like exercise. Before you do some excerise you usually stretch. Maybe you'll do a little bit of movement to get your heart pumped. You don't just start exercise. You do a warm up through. The same is true with reading. What a good reader does is they have a warm up period. The best readers usually do a warm up.

 

For exercise, people usually run or jog for a certain amount of time, and then afterwards they have what we call a cooldown period. "Cooldown" is usually when somebody wants to slow their heartrate, so maybe they walk instead of running, maybe they do more stretches, but they don't just stop what they're doing. They do slower activities before they stop exercising. So if you think about reading like exercise, you should also have a warm up, then you read, and then the cooldown. 

 

The KWL method helps you read something difficult and understand it. 'K' stands for 'Know'. What do you already know about what you're going to read? This would be like your warm up. Then you have 'W', which stands for 'What do you want to learn?' So usually you need to write a bunch of questions under 'W', and this is also a part of the warm up. It makes you pay attention more to what you're reading.

 

Finally, 'L' stands for 'Learned', which is like the cooldown. In this arear you are going to write: What did you learn from what you've just read? This is going to really help you with your memory especially. What are some interesting things you learned? Sometimes 'L' is based off of what you wanted to know. Maybe you have a question, and then you can write the answer to your question if you find it.

 

 

Albert Einstein

 

Let me take 'Albert Einstein' as an example. I was not really strong in science, but I was really interested in physics and math, but again, for me it's a little bit difficult to read about physics because I didn't really have a strong background in it. So I used the 'KWL' method to better understand the book. First I wrote: 'Know', and I thought about 'What do I know about Einstein?', which should happen before I read the book. What I know all about Einstein was 'E = mc2', crazy hair, a genius, German, a scientist, and so on. These were the things that I already knew about Einstein.

 

What I did next is think about some questions 'What do I want to know about Einstein?' Before I read the book, what do I want to know? I knew E = mc2, but I had no idea what it meant and how it worked. So I wanted to know something like 'How did he discover it' 'Was he in his lab doing an experimentm and found out the theory of relativity?' 'Was he sitting on a beach and suddenly he just thought about it?' 'What is it used for?' 'Do we build things with it?' 'Is it used for ...?' and the list goes on ... I wrote everything I wanted to know about the book. Then I sat and I kept reading it. While I read, I did write something that I thought was really interesting or something that surprised me, and something that I learned. 

 

 

A kid engaged in the book

 

In the first chapter I learned Einstein was married mutiple times. He married and then divorced, and then married again. He was really romantic. I learned he didn't actually fail high school math. I learned he was born in Germany, but became a Swiss citizen. and I kept writing everything, which I believed helped me better keep reading the book. As I said earlier, I was not big on science on which I was less likely to read on from cover to cover. This is exactly where I need something to keep me engaged in the book.

 

The 'KWL' method kept me focused on the book without losing interest and helped me remember more, which led to less time it took me to finish the book because I didn't have to read the same book repeatedly. This method is not only true with the book 'Albert Einstein', but it also with any other kinds of books. Next time you read something really difficult for your English improvement, I encourage you to try the method 'KWL'