Test post Rickla
Test post Rickla
ERC
Blog for the PUK ERCSpeed reading
Reading fast is very important. It’s important for getting information and understanding things, but it’s also important for learning English. Here is a list of advantages:
- If you read fast, you can read more and get more information. This is especially important if you want to study overseas.
- If you read fast, you can understand better, because you can remember the beginning when you get to the end (so you can understand the whole meaning).
- If you read more, you get more language input, and more language input means you learn more words and sentence patterns.
Probably the best way to learn to read better is to read many books. But it’s also good to practice speed reading, too. Here is a good site to help you. (This was mentioned in a student’s post, but I’m afraid I don’t know whose.) To start, I would recommend the following settings: 3, 0.4, 0.25. This is slightly faster than the average American college student’s reading speed.
If it feels much too fast, try again, but make it even faster! Then move the speed down to the original one and try again. What words can you remember? If that is much too fast, try a slower speed but not a comfortable one!.
Taming Tessa (LLL)
This book is from Story Street, half of the Longman Literacy Land series.
Meg Cabot
Do you know the Princess Diaries? I like this series. The author has a great website. You can read excerpts from her books, for example Sweet Sixteen Princess.
Popular books
Checking the library shelves at PUK, and asking some students, it seems that Usborne Young Reading and Oxford Reading Tree are still by far the most popular series. We got an extra 200 UYR books a month or two ago, and they seem to be enough; before we did that, I would often go to the library and find that every UYR book was lent out.
I think it’s great to find a series that you like and read most or all of the books in the series. But I hope you’ll also find time to explore other series. I Can Read is a series that many students overlook.
Bookshelf
I decided to try out Booklog for myself. It’s quite nice, but the interface is poor, so it takes a long time to add books, and it isn’t possible to add book covers when they are not available on Amazon Japan. I think LibraryThing is much better, so I have chosen to use that. But Booklog’s way of presenting books is very nice. Here is my Bookshelf.
Meeting changed to February 5th
Last time we met, we were planning to hold the February meeting on 6th. But because of Eri and Megumi’s exam schedule, let’s change it to the 5th. I think Kanade and Miho said either day is good, so I don’t think there’ll be any problems.
By the way, did you hear that the title and release date of the final Harry Potter book have been decided? See if you can guess what the Japanese translation of this will be!
Book log
Recently I wrote about Book log. I’ve been thinking that it might be possible to use it in an interesting way. Perhaps we could record all the books that ERC members read in one shelf? Do you have any ideas?
