The course is coming to its end and I wish to take the forum to one pivotal point of learning English, Extensive Reading.
Extensive reading (ER) helps the students became better readers and expands their vocabulary. If you are juggling with cramming your mind with vocabulary and textbook-based learning (only), the outcome of your effort is normally far from what you have aspired for. For instance, one is unable to chat confidently whenever one ran in to a foreigner, despite after years of English learning. One of the aspects often skipped in using textbook only learning method is, one lacks the general knowledge required for deeper conversation. Hence, not surprisingly students engaged in a rather shallow conversation with a foreigner before awkward situation kicks in where they find themselves having nothing much to narrate further.
Many, if not most, students have a rather limited experience and knowledge of the world they inhabit both cognitively and affectively. Vocabulary is not learned by a single exposure. If you are still force-feeeding your mind with vocabularies that are not derived from your own reading, you will find it precariously most of the vocabularies you remembered are soon forgotten. ER allows for multiple encounters with words and phrases in context thus making possible the progressive accretion of meanings to them. Thus, if you read extensively, chances are you will remember more vocabularies with less hassle.
Let me make it clearly that I am not implying intensive reading is not necessary, and that we should only do extensive reading. Far from it. Done correctly, class-based intensive reading work feeds the right kind of skills into extensive reading, building up the students text attack abilities over time. Most students are honed in intensive reading, maybe it is time to navigate into some other domain now ?
That is quite true. Before I came into the college, I just focused on remembering the meaning of every word because the exams only ask you to read the articles showing on the papers,and speaking is not that important to get high marks. But as soon as I get into college, I just found that to learn a language is to master it,to be capable of speaking and using it,not for taking exams and getting certificate. And we speak a language to express our mind,so to expand and sharpen our mind is actually more significant than having fancy words. What’s more,English language can’t only be learned by extensive reading,listening,writing and speaking and at very high frequency or even if we have known the meaning of a vocabulary literally,we still can’t use it correctly in a certain situation since in different condition we should use different vocabularies although some of which seem to have same meaning in Chinese.Also,extensive reading can help us think in English and that is the key.
I know that learning English need a large vocabulary, but most of the time I choose to memorize words from the text, without thinking of accumulating vocabulary through extensive reading. I suddenly remember that one of my brothers told me that I don’t need try to remember the word "iPhone", but I still know how to spell it, because I’ve seen this word many times.