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Is it difficult for you to understand or remember what you read? In this video, I will teach you an easy method that will help you become better at reading difficult material such as textbooks and journal articles. It is known as the “KWL” reading method. You will also remember more of what you read by using this method. If you plan to study at an English school, college, or university, this method will really help you. You can also use this method to help you in the IELTS and TOEFL exams. Try the KWL method yourself and tell me how it works for you in the comments!
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TRANSCRIPT
Hello. My name is Emma, and in today’s video I am going to teach you how to be a better reader. So I want you to think about your life. 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 difficult and you don’t know what’s happening. Well, if you’re having difficulty reading or even if you just want to remember what you read more and be a better studier, this video is for you.
So first let’s look at some things students might be reading that might be causing difficulty. Some students in their universities they have to read textbooks. If you go to university or college, or also high school, you have to do a lot of reading and you have to do a lot of complicated reading, especially for sciences, maths, history. So, this is a very good method. I’m going to teach you how to read these books better. Newspapers. Sometimes you’ll be reading the newspaper and it’s difficult, especially in another language. So if you’re reading a newspaper and, you know, you want to be better at reading it, this video is for you. Internet sources. There’s a lot of great things on the internet to read, and so this will also help you if you look reading things from the internet. Magazines.
Journals, for anyone who’s a professional, whether you’re a doctor, a nurse, a historian, or if you’re in university or college, a lot of the times you have to read something called a journal, which is something for professionals to read about their field. So it’s usually modern research. These things can be very difficult to read, so if you’re reading these, this is a great technique for you. If you’re doing the TOEFL or IELTS. Although I wouldn’t recommend using this technique on the actual exam, I think it’s great for your practice tests and I’ll tell you why a bit later. So you can use this when you’re practicing for the TOEFL and IELTS. And finally, if you’re reading Shakespeare. When I read Shakespeare I had no idea what was going on. It was very confusing, all of the old English. I found it very difficult to read. There are also a lot of books that can be very, very hard to read. So these techniques will really work for you for any of these situations and many more.
So before I teach you about the KWL technique, I just want you to think about reading for a second. Okay? A lot of people when they pick up a book, that’s all they do. They open it up and they start reading right away, and then they close the book and then a lot of the 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. I like to think of reading how I think of jogging or running. So if we look here, I have the word “running” or “jogging”. If you like exercise, any type of exercise kind of follows this format. So, reading is a lot like running. What a good reader does is they have a warm up period. So if you think about running, before you go running you usually stretch. Maybe you’ll do a little bit of movement to get your heart pumped. So you don’t just start running. You do a warm up. The same is true with reading. The best reading… The best readers usually do a warm up.
For exercise, people then usually run or jog for a certain amount of time, and then afterwards they have what we call a cooldown period. So, “cooldown” is usually when somebody wants to slow their heartrate, so maybe they walk instead of run, maybe they do more stretches, but they don’t just stop what they’re doing. They slowly, you know, do slower activities before they stop jogging or running. So if you think about reading like exercise, you should also have a warm up, and then you read, and then the cooldown. This is the meat. This is the main idea of the KWL method, and I’m going to teach you exactly how we can do all of this when we read.