How to Read More

Giphy

According to Stanford lecturer and researcher and behaviour psychologist BJ Fogg, there are two ways to pick up a good habit effectively. The first way is to change your environment, while the second is to make the habit you desire to pick up easy to do and tie it up with an existing habit.

This struck me as invaluable advice for teachers who wish to motivate their students to pick up the habit of reading.

Many English teachers (or language teachers in general) have preached about the importance of reading for learning a language. They have repeatedly said that “You must read 1) a lot and 2) every day to learn a language.” And they’re probably right. I have not heard of any second language learner who is able to master a language without reading widely and frequently. (And for that matter, native speakers either…)

Most students do agree with their teachers on the importance of reading. More problematic, however, is that many teachers do not know how to motivate their students to read. And needless to say, few students know how to motivate themselves to read when their teachers are away. Many students tend to believe that they are “too lazy”. That they are (and will stay) the way they are. And they will never learn how to motivate themselves to pick up the habit of reading.

Since a young age, I have always been a voracious reader. I cannot imagine being able to learn English well without having been one and I have always wanted to inspire more people to share the joy of reading with me. And I find that my advice for students on picking up the habit of reading could fit in perfectly with Dr. Fogg’s methods on how to trigger a persistent and positive change in behaviour. Reading has to be a habit, not a whimsical or impulsive action, if it were to help you learn a language.

Here’s how you can

1. change your environment and
2. tie up the habit of reading more English with your existing habits.

How to change your environment

I was lucky to be born into a family where both of my parents love reading and I have been inculcated into thinking that reading is something fun to do and almost like a necessity in life. However, we do not have a choice over who our family are and it can’t be realistic to expect that your parents to change into another person who is a big book lover. So it’s down to you to start changing the environment around you yourself. Here are several ways how:

• Subscribe to email newsletters (Look to things that interest you. I personally am a religious reader of the email newsletter from the Economist, the Atlantic, Reader’s Digest (for health and life tips), the Paris Review, the BBC, Brainpickings)
• If you were new to the habit of reading, it is only natural that you find reading passages boring and too demanding. Start small. If possible, install apps like Twitter, Reddit, Buzzfeed, Reddit or even 9gags to read fun (and often very funny) one-liners. If you read the posts from these massively entertaining apps, you cannot only learn the language itself, you can also learn about cultural references, which (especially as you venture into advanced levels) are crucial for providing a context essential for comprehension. Understanding and incorporating cultural references into your writing will also render it much more engaging.
• Subscribe to Youtube Channels in English which you enjoy watching. Again, start with what interests you. There are Youtube Channels on all sorts of topics — beauty, movies, science. You can turn on the English subtitles for most English speaking Youtube videos now. Both reading the subtitles and listening to native speakers speak on these channels can help. The former directly while the latter indirectly by giving you a better feel of how the language works.
• Change the system language of your phone to English. (Does this even require explanation?)

How to tie the habit of reading to an existing habit

• Dr. Fogg advised people to use an existing habit as a trigger and start to adopt the “After I do X, I will do Y” routine. For me, picking up the habit of reading is even easier than this because there are often times when you can do reading simultaneously when you are doing something else. For example, pledge to yourself that whenever I take the escalator, you will read the headlines in your email newsletters and move them to the bin. Or whenever you’re on the commute, you read 3 pages of an e-book on your iPhone. For me personally, I have got used to listening to the radio in the shower, bringing a book with me into the bathroom so that I can read it while I am taking off my clothes. This may seem like an overkill but this tiny habit goes a long way when I do it every day. Many a little makes a mickle.

Originally published at finnieslanguagearts.com on April 13, 2017.