pause and think: or, how to improve your language skills

A very useful way to improve the quality of your spoken language comes from the website antimoon - which was the subject of an earlier blog entry
Jay Doubleyou: antimoon
but which is so useful, here it is again:

How to get the most out of English texts

by Tomasz P. Szynalski

Reading for content

Normally, when reading a text, people use a strategy that I call “reading for content”. The goal of this strategy is to get the main idea of the text as quickly as possible and with as little effort as possible. To accomplish this goal, your brain will try to read as few words as possible and spend only a fraction of a second on each word.

For example, when reading the following passage, you don’t really see it like this:

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing. In the book it said: “Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion.”

I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. And after some work with a colored pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing.

To your brain, it looks more or less like this:

 when I was six years old I saw  magnificent picture in book, called True Stories  Nature, about  forest.  picture  boa  swallowing animal. Here  copy  drawing.  book  said: “Boa swallow  prey whole, without chewing  After they  not able  move, and they sleep  six months  need  digestion.”

I pondered deeply adventures  jungle. And after  work with  colored pencil I succeeded  making my first drawing.

Here are some characteristics of “reading for content”:

• Not seeing “grammar words” like a, the, in, of, through, that. The eye only stops at content words (main nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs).
• Not seeing word forms: Was it look or looked? Has looked or had looked?
• Not noticing the exact spelling. It is well known that the brain recognizes whole words — it does not analyze them letter by letter. Native speakers see the word piece all the time, but many of them still misspell it as peice, because the two spellings have similar shapes.
• Ignoring difficult words that are not essential to understanding the meaning (here: primeval, constrictor). Who has the time to use a dictionary?

An extreme example of “word blindness” is the rather well-known puzzle where you’re asked to count how many times the letter F occurs in the following passage:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

Click here for answer:

Reading for content is a great, time-saving way to extract information from written content. The problem is that you may not need grammar words tounderstand a text, but you do need them to produce a text. If you skip overgrammar words while reading, you may have difficulty using them correctly in your own sentences.

Here’s an illuminating passage posted by Maya l’abeille at the Antimoon Forum:

I believe that seeing correct and typical English sentences helps a lot to learn how to use English properly. It is also important to read and read again every structure that is new to you, so that you can remember them. If you only read the book without taking any pause to think carefully about the “new” sentences, you will hardly remember any of them.

I’ve read all Harry Potter books straight myself, and when I opened them again, I realised I had viewed loads and loads of useful structures whithout remembering them — which was such a shame! I’m reading The Full Monty (Penguin Readers collection) using the “pause and think” method at present. Now after a few days of daily reading, when I take a look at an English text, many structures are familiar to me — “hey, I remember reading this one in The Full Monty!”.

Therefore, I believe this method is efficient and I would advise it to all learners.

Sometimes, we don’t realise how wealthy a single book can be — loads to learn just in one of them.

Pause and think

I agree with Maya about the “pause and think” method. Here’s the process that I recommend for dealing with sentences in texts:

1. Stop at interesting (not obvious) things: a new word, how a word was used, a grammatical structure, a preposition, an article, a conjunction, the order of words, etc. For example, spend a while to think about the fact that the sentence contains the preposition at, and not on. Perhaps the sentence uses the present perfect tense where you would have expected the past simple. Perhaps the word order is different than in your first language.
2. If the sentence contains a useful phrase, ask yourself: Could you produce a similar phrase yourself? Would you use the right tenses, articles and prepositions? Would you use the right word order? If you’re not sure, read the phrase again. Practice saying it (or a similar phrase) aloud or in your mind. The idea is to program your brain with it.
3. If necessary, or if you feel like it, use your dictionary to find definitions of words in the sentence and get more example sentences. This will help enrich your “feel” of the word.

Important notes

• You don’t have to use “pause and think” all the time. Reading in this mode can be quite exhausting, so don’t do it when you’re tired after a long reading session.

How to get the most out of English texts | Antimoon

And some discussion:
Is “pause and think” worth it? « The Antimoon Blog
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