How I Improve My Reading Skill

By Natasya Rosa Fariska Alexandra, 1806140193, Class B

In this era, English is one of the important thing in every single aspect of
human life. In this globalization era that is filled by challenges and competitions,
everyone is demanded not only to have a high level of education but also required
to have a special capability, called skill. Reading skill is one of the most needed
skills in this globalization era.

Sometimes, I found that reading needs a lot of attention. I have to focus on

what I read to understand what is happening. I often read a medical book in English,
and I found that there are many unknown words that I need to search in my
dictionary. But not long after I started to search for them, I ended up sleeping. And
when I woke up, I realized that I just read one paragraph. It makes me feels like I’m
so stupid that I can't read in English.

But then I realized that I have to read the right books to improve my reading
skill. I can’t just jump into something that I don’t really know, something that I
don’t really understand. When I choose something to read, I always think about
what kind of text I’m interested in. I personally interested in the fairy tale. I know
it sounds childish, but if it can help me to improve my reading skill, why not? I
always increase the difficulty of my reading materials. By doing this, I will
continuously see new words, new phrases, new sentence structures, and so on.

I always ask myself some questions after I read the text. It is a simple
question such as, what was the text about? What are the most important things that
happened in the text? Are there any parts I didn’t understand? I might have more
questions, depending on what kind of text I read.

Sometimes, reading a text once isn’t really enough for me to understand

what is really happening in the text. I always re-read something more than once to
help me understand it much better. Re-reading the text is really good when I read
the words, but can’t get them to make sense. It’s also great for finding the details
or finding things I might have missed the first time.

In conclusion, I think if we want to improve our reading skill, we have to be

patient. Improving reading skill is not something we can do in days or weeks. The
best thing we can do to improve is very simple. Read as much as possible, spent as
much time reading in English as we can. We need to be patient and enjoy the long-
slow process. Also, we need to set ourselves challenges. For example, use a timer
when reading something, and set yourself a time limit. Try to read the whole text
and understand it within that time.