Grab a book…

Tips for choosing books in English:

Choosing which type of book to read, to help imporve your English is important. If you chose the wrong book then it will not improve your English as much as you would like.

Below are tips on how to chose the right book for you;

1. GRADED READERS

These are novels in English that have been edited to your level. You can find them from levels Elementary – Advanced. Some of them also have the advantage of having comprehension questions with answers, a mini dictionary of the key words and a CD with the story recorded on it as well.

There is a disadvantage to graded readers, being that the storyline, vocabulary and grammar have all been simplified. This means that you won’t always see so much new language and the story will be less interesting. That said these books overall are a very good choice, especially if you are a lower level of English.

2. BILINGUAL BOOKS 

This is also a popular option. The left hand page is your language whilst the right hand page is in English. The obvious advantage of these books is that they allow you to compare the English against your own language.  There are a couple of problems though, the first is that sometimes it can take more words to express an idea in English, so the paragraphs on the two pages don’t match. A second problem is that with the story there in your own language, this encourages you to translate and think in your own language when reading the English – this is something you should try to avoid.

3. BOOKS YOU HAVE ALREADY READ IN YOUR OWN LANGUAGE

This has its advantages as you will already know the storyline and characters, which means you can focus on on the English language element more.

4. BOOKS FOR CHILDREN OR TEENAGERS

These have the advantage of being easier to understand in terms of the language and the storyline.

5. SLANG, JARGON AND FANTASY

These can be a problem, especially fantasy books as they tend to invent new words for objects and actions – this can cause confusion.

6. BOOKS THAT HAVE FILMS

This is a very useful option and there are so many of them! You can watch the film and understand most of the story within 2 hours, this will then help you when reading the book….finding differences between what happens in the book and the film can become a fun and useful English learning task.

7. NON-FICTION BOOKS

Such as biographies are a good choice as the language can sometimes actually be easier to follow.