Xurxo knows the secret of learning to write. When I read one of his essays and asked him where he learned to write so well, he said, “Reading New York Times essays.” The secret to learning to write is fairly simple – if you want to write essays, read essays. In other words, read the kind of thing you want to write.

When you read, you walk into a writing classroom. You see how to spell words. How to punctuate sentences. How to organize paragraphs. The more you read, the more you’ll learn about writing. You can learn to write – like Xurxo did – by reading.  And you can do that because reading allows you to learn vicariously.

Vicarious learning

You learn vicariously when you see or hear someone do something that interests you. If you’re eating with a group of people and someone says, “Pass the sugar, please,” you suddenly know how to ask for the sugar and, possibly, what sugar is. And if you continue to watch and listen, you learn what to do with the sugar when it is passed to you, to put it in your tea and not on your potatoes. The learning happened automatically and, in this example, instantly.

Vicarious learning explains why young children often speak and act like their parents – and sometimes embarrass them when they do! It also explains why, when they’re older, they speak and act like their friends or their favorite sports or entertainment heroes.

Vicarious learning also explains why I do certain things when I teach. I watched and listened to the teachers I admired and automatically learned something from them about how to teach.

Vicarious learning is automatic and when it happens, you usually don’t notice it. It requires little or no effort. One person does something and, as a result, someone who is watching or listening learns.

Learning to write vicariously

If you want to take advantage of this powerful way to learn to write, there are two things to keep in mind.

First, if you want to learn to write by reading, you have to identify yourself, or be able to imagine yourself, as a writer. You need to see yourself as someone who could do the same thing as the writer you are reading. That’s why I learned from my favorite teachers – I watched and listened to them as a (future) teacher.

Second, you won’t learn to write by reading if you try to study and memorize what the writer is doing. The key is to be aware of what the writer is doing – to read with a kind of relaxed concentration – but not to analyze what he or she is doing.

As you read, different aspects of the writing may come to your mind – the spelling of a word you’ve never seen but use when you speak, the way the writer expresses a certain idea, etc. Enjoy what you’re reading, think along with the writer, and let your brain do the work automatically.

Getting started

To get started, try this. Choose an essay by William Zinsser; he’s interesting, easy to understand, and a very good writer. Or from the New York Times, like Xurxo did. Read it once  – like a reader – to understand what the writer is saying. Then read it again – like a writer – and think with the writer as you read.

If you continue to read this way, you will pick up most of what you need to write well. Like Xurxo, you will learn to write by reading. Writers and writing teachers I know agree – it’s not possible to learn everything you have to know to write well by studying and practice. But it is possible to learn to write by reading. In fact, it’s the only way.

Warren Ediger

Related reading: Learning to write – introduction

Reference: F. Smith. Reading like a writer. Joining the Literacy Club; also Reading without Nonsense.

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Are you reading – or listening – effectively? If you’re a regular visitor to Successful English, you already know that reading is the key to acquiring language. Here’s a checklist – from two articles I read this week – to help you make sure your reading is helping you get the job done.

The checklist – thanks mostly to Dr. Richard Day and Dr. Stephen Krashen:

Make it easy

Read books, magazines, and comics that do not require a great deal of effort, that are well within your ability. There is nothing to be gained by “working” through texts that are “challenging” and require grim determination.

Lower your standards

When doing recreational reading, there is no need to read classics, no need to read “quality literature.” It’s okay to read books in translation.

Read for pleasure

If you get the greatest pleasure from stories, read stories. If you get the greatest pleasure from reading something else, read something else. But always read for pleasure.

Don’t be afraid to discard

If you discover that what you’re reading isn’t easy or enjoyable, stop! Find something that is.

Read narrowly

Rather than attempting to read widely, and becoming “well-rounded,” take advantage of narrow reading, that is, reading several books by one author or about a single topic of interest. If you really enjoy something, read more of it.

Read faster rather than slower

If you read too slowly, it will be difficult for you to stay “connected” with what you’re reading. And if you stop frequently – for example, to look words up in a dictionary – staying “connected” is almost impossible.

Read as much as possible

The more you read, the more English you will acquire.

Carry a book or magazine with you everywhere

Few people have “time to read.” Carry a book everywhere and assume that you’ll have time to read during the day – standing in line, waiting for a bus, waiting for service in a restaurant, etc.

Remember – most of these rules also apply when you listen to acquire more English.

How did you do? Or rather, how did your reading do? If the checklist describes your reading, you can be confident that your English is growing!

This week, one of my students – who I know well enough to know that his reading is getting the job done – wrote:

“For me … there are two important things in my [English] journey:

First, to talk to you on Fridays;
Second, to put a novel into my rucksack.

The perfect place to acquire language is anywhere…”

He’s right!

Warren Ediger

References: Richard Day (2003), Why Youngkyu Can’t Read; Stephen Krashen (2006), The Autonomous Language Acquirer.

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Jazz musician Paul Desmond once said that “Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.” Desmond understood something very important about writing: good writing doesn’t come from direct instruction. And the writers, writing teachers, and language specialists I know agree. If you want to learn where good writing comes from and how to write better, be sure to read all of the Learning to write articles.

What is writing?

A few weeks ago, I wrote that reading is making sense of text. When you read, you read to understand the writer’s ideas.

When you become the writer, you are responsible to create text that makes sense to your readers. According to one of America’s great writing teachers, your goal “is to get your ideas from your mind into someone else’s mind as clearly, speedily, and economically as possible.”

Many people think of writing as a language activity when, in fact, it’s more about thinking – having good, clear ideas and organizing them so someone else can easily understand them. Writing helps make your thinking clear. When you write, you discover what you know or don’t know about your subject – in other words, you learn. William Zinsser, another well-known writing teacher, says it like this:

We write to find out what we know and what we want to say. I thought of how often I had made clear to myself some subject I had previously known nothing about by just putting one sentence after another – by reasoning my way [step by step] to its meaning. I thought of how often writing even the simplest document – a letter, for instance – had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.

Starting at the very beginning

Almost every week someone sends me an e-mail to tell me they’re having trouble writing and to ask for help. When they do, the most common problem is simply this – not enough English.

If you want to write English well, you need a good supply of English. We who live in southern California know the importance of reservoirs. Southern California is dry, almost a desert. The water we use comes from lake-like reservoirs that are filled each year when spring sunshine melts the snow in the mountains. Our ability to live well depends on a good supply of water from these reservoirs. Your ability to write well depends on having an English language reservoir that is full of enough to supply the kind of thinking and writing you want to do.

There is only one way to fill your English reservoir – reading. The more you read, the more your vocabulary will grow. The more you read, the more your grammar and spelling will improve. The more you read, the more you will discover about putting your ideas into sentences and paragraphs so they make sense and say what you want to say. The more you read, the more your ability to write will emerge.

Getting started

If your reservoir, or supply, of English is low, begin now to fill it. Set up a regular reading schedule – at least 20 or 30 minutes a day. If you have time and can read more, great! Your English will grow faster.

If you’re not sure what to read or how to read, look at these articles:

• The power of reading and listening
• Using popular fiction to improve your English
• A word every language learner should know
• Expert answers – how to meet a new word

NOTE: If you have specific questions about writing, please ask them in the comment section at the end of this article. If possible, I’ll include answers in future articles.

Warren Ediger

References: David Lambuth et al, The Golden Book on Writing (1963); William Zinsser, Writing to Learn (1988) and On Writing Well, 7th ed. (2006)

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There’s no question. None at all. Fluency in any language comes from what we read and what we hear. This is what the research tells us. And this is what the experience of many language learners – like Adrian’s – tells us.

The most important principle of language acquisition is very simple: we acquire, or pick up, language when we read or hear interesting and comprehensible, or understandable, input.

When you read what I have written on this page, you receive input – ideas about acquiring language. If you understand what I have written, the input is comprehensible. If that is true, something is happening to your English now while you are reading. Maybe your vocabulary is growing. Or perhaps you are picking up a new way to organize written ideas in English. There are many possibilities, but it is changing or improving in some way. The process is automatic and you don’t usually notice it when it happens.

Now there’s a new word to help us think and talk about this process.

The word is …

com pel’ ling (adjective) – (1) so interesting or exciting that you have to pay attention; (2) input that is so interesting that a reader or listener temporarily “forgets” that the input is in another language.

Example sentences:

• That article was so compelling that I forgot what time it was.
• The book was so compelling that I didn’t realize I was actually reading in English!

Why is compelling such an important word? It’s important because if what you read or listen to is compelling, the conditions are ideal for acquiring more language. So, if you want to be sure to acquire more English – or any other language – find something compelling to read or listen to.

A compelling way to improve your English

There is another way to use the word compelling. When something is compelling, we have to act or do something about it. So I encourage you to take action. Find some compelling input – a book, story, article, podcast, or video – and read it or listen to it. When you finish, do it again. And again.

If you make this process a habit, your English will get better. And – if I may use the word one more time – that’s a compelling thought.

Warren Ediger

Acknowledgement: The idea for this article came from a brief speech Dr. Stephen Krashen gave at the International Forum on Language Teaching in southern California on July 28^th.

Related reading:

• The Basics – especially Only one way and Inside the brain
• The power of reading and listening

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If you have trouble finding books in English, ManyBooks.net is another place for you to look. ManyBooks has more than 28,000 books in their collection, books they say are “the best ebooks at the best price: free!”

In some ways, ManyBooks.net is similar to Lit2Go. Both of them are collections of public domain books – books that are no longer protected by copyright – which can be distributed freely to anyone. Even though these are older books, they still provide hours of interesting reading for many people. The collections are similar, but ManyBooks has several features that distinguish it from Lit2Go.

What’s different about ManyBooks?

On its attractive web site, ManyBooks provides several ways to look at the book collection. In addition to the ability to search the entire collection, you to can explore the ManyBooks collection by author, title, genre (type), and language.

Among the authors, look at the works of Jack London (Call of the Wild, ), Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island), Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines), Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility), and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan).

Books of the week are listed on the home page, and there are also lists of New Titles and Recommended books.

At the bottom of the Recommended page there are links to:

• New Additions
• Popular Titles
• Recent Downloads
• Special Collections
• User’s Public Bookshelves – you can create a free account at NewBooks and create a list of the books you have read and what you think of them.
• A List of eBooks in Series
• Reader Recommendations
• Random Books
• Cover Image Gallery

Each of these provides a different way of looking at or searching for books in the ManyBooks collection. If you want to be notified when ManyBooks adds new books to their collection, you can subscribe to one of their RSS feeds.

When you find a book

When you click on the title of a book you might be interested in, ManyBooks takes you to a book information page. There you will find information about the book and a link that says Show Excerpt. When you click on it, you can read a short excerpt from the book. The excerpts are long enough to give you an idea of what the book is about and how difficult it is.

One of the nice features of ManyBooks is the ability to download books in a wide variety of text formats. Almost every text format I’m aware of is in the list, including formats for smartphones and Kindle. You can also download many of the books as audio books.

Remember

The key to success, if you want to read and listen to improve your English, is to read books that are interesting and easy to understand. Take the time and make the effort to find books that are appropriate for you.

If you find a book that looks especially good in the ManyBooks collection, leave a comment so others can go look at it, too!

Warren Ediger

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In a recent tweet, I encouraged readers to subscribe to William Zinsser’s Zinsser on Friday blog posts at The American Scholar (TAS). Unfortunately, I left out the link. Here are the links to the TAS web site and the blog feed

• The American Scholar web site.
• The American Scholar RSS feed – including William Zinsser’s Zinsser on Friday blog posts.

Since I included TAS in Spotlight – great ideas and academic English delivered to your desktop, several people have written to tell me how much they enjoy TAS. The articles are interesting, well-written, and understandable for many high-intermediate and advanced English learners. And Zinsser is always worth reading.

Warren Ediger

When you use what you learned in your first language to make English more comprehensible, or understandable, you improve your ability to acquire more English. Stanford University just made that easier for medical students and professionals. And even if you’re not in medicine, you can learn how to use what you already know in your area of study or work to improve your English.

The most important thing an English learner can know is this – when you read or listen to interesting, understandable English, you acquire, or pick up more English. In other words, if you want your English to improve, find things that you enjoy and are easy to understand and do as much reading and listening as you can.

One very good way to make English understandable is to take advantage of what you learned in your first language. This is what Adrian, a Brazilian law professor, did when he decided to read John Grisham’s novels about lawyers and law firms. Adrian tells me that his knowledge of law helped him understand the English in Grisham’s novels and acquire more English.

A few days ago, on the Open Culture web site, I discovered an excellent way for medical students and professionals to do the same thing Adrian did. And I have some suggestions for those of you who want to do something similar but come from other academic backgrounds.

Stanford Mini Med School

The Stanford Mini Med School is a series of classes that introduce students to human biology, health and disease, and changes in medical research and healthcare. It includes video lectures by more than 30 distinguished faculty, scientists, and doctors from Stanford’s medical school.

You can take the classes for credit from Stanford’s School of Continuing studies, but you don’t have to. You can listen to all the lectures – free – on iTunes U or YouTube. And you can order the textbook, Body: the Complete Human, and do the reading assignments. This popular text is published by National Geographic and is filled with clear explanations and photographs.

Using the Stanford Mini Med School to improve your English

The Mini Med School is divided into three courses:

Course 1: The Dynamics of Human Health

• List of lectures and reading assignments
• Lecture videos on iTunes U and YouTube

Course 2: Medicine, Human Health, and the Frontiers of Science

• List of lectures and reading assignments
• Lecture videos on iTunes U and YouTube

Course 3: Transforming Our Understanding of Human Health and Disease

• List of lectures and reading assignments will be available later
• Lecture videos (partial) on iTunes U

Here are my suggestion for using the Stanford Mini Med School to improve your English:

• Begin with lectures that cover topics you are familiar with.
• Begin with introductory topics and build toward advanced topics. Be patient!

Remember, the strategy is to use medical content you are already familiar with to scaffold, or support, your understanding of English.

But what if I’m not a medical student or professional?

I’m looking around to see if there are similar content packages in other academic areas. But you don’t need to wait if you’re willing to do a little work. Here are three good sources for academic content from a large number of outstanding universities:

• Free Online Courses from Top Universities from the Open Culture web site.
• iTunes U at the iTunes Store. If you aren’t familiar with iTunes U, read my article Preparing for the TOEFL at iTunes U.
• The Academic Earth web site. Many of the lectures include transcripts so you can read what the professor is saying while you listen to the lecture.

Follow the same instructions I gave earier:

• Find subjects and lectures that cover topics you’re familiar with.
• Begin with introductory topics and build toward advanced topics. Be patient!

Remember – the strategy is to use academic content you’re already familiar with to scaffold, or support, your understanding of English. As you listen and read and your English improves, you’ll be able to move up to more difficult material.

Warren Ediger

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The best way to improve your writing and speaking is to read good writers and listen to good speakers! Today I’d like to spotlight three great reading and listening sources for more advanced English learners. All three of them contain a lot of academic English. And all three of them provide RSS feeds so you can feast on more great ideas and good English every time they add something new.

The American Scholar

The American Scholar (TAS) is a quarterly journal (published every three months). It’s filled with articles by and about some of the greatest thinkers of yesterday and today. Their articles focus on current events, politics, history, science, culture, and the arts.

One of my favorite writers, William Zinsser, writes regularly about writing, the arts, and popular culture for TAS. I recently recommended his book, Writing to Learn, as another good source for academic English.

TAS is in the process of putting previous issues online. When I checked, I found the last 24 issues. That’s a lot of great reading!

David Brooks, NY Times

I don’t always agree with everything that David Brooks writes, but I always appreciate his careful thought and excellent writing. He writes two columns every week about current events and American culture. New York Magazine recently ran an interesting profile (a short article about someone) of Brooks.

TED: Ideas worth spreading

TED provides a growing collection of short – 20 minutes or less – videos on important contemporary topics by many of the world’s leading thinkers, speakers, and artists. There is, literally, something for everyone at TED.

For someone who wants to develop their academic English, TED provides great variety, and each video is accompanied by a complete transcript. When you go to a video, you’ll see a link that says “Open interactive transcript” on the right side of the video. When you click on the link, the transcript opens so you can listen and read at the same time. If you want to move forward or backward in the video, you can click on the sentence you want to go to, and the video will automatically go to that sentence.

RSS feeds

RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” If you haven’t used RSS, it’s an easy way to have new material delivered to your computer whenever it is put onto the Internet. I use Google Reader to follow my RSS feeds.

Here are the RSS feeds for each of the three sources I’ve described:

• The American Scholar
• David Brooks, NY Times
• TED: Ideas worth spreading

Setting up an RSS feed in Google Reader is very easy. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Copy the RSS feed you want to subscribe to.
2. Go to Google Reader and click on “Add a subscription.”
3. Paste the RSS feed into the subscription box.
4. Click on “Add.”

In the future, whenever you open Google Reader, you will see the latest material – videos, articles, blog posts, etc. – from the sources you subscribed to.

Warren Ediger

Related reading:

• How to learn something (including academic English) for nothing
• Prepare for the TOEFL at iTunes U

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“Doing your homework” is a phrase we occasionally use informally to refer to due diligence, the careful research that someone does before signing a legal or financial document or making a big decision. Many students don’t do their TOEFL homework, or they let other people do it for them. As a result they’re not prepared to take the TOEFL because they don’t have the information they need or worse, they have the wrong information.

In Rethinking the TOEFL, I suggested some new, healthier ways to think about the TOEFL and what it means. Today I want to continue what I started there and talk about finding the information you need to properly prepare for the TOEFL.

Who can you trust?

In the years that I’ve worked with students preparing for the TOEFL, a lot of students have told me “My friends tell me…” or “There’s a man in my country that gives TOEFL classes and he says….” Very often, the information that follows has been wrong. And the consequences, or results, of the misinformation could have been a lower TOEFL score.

There is also a lot of misinformation about the TOEFL on the Internet. I recently watched a YouTube video about the integrated writing question that gave wrong information about the question. As a result, the suggestions for how to answer the question were also wrong. Many of the lists of “essential TOEFL words” on the Internet are not true academic word lists and will only waste your time.

Go to the source

The best place to start, if you want to know about the TOEFL, is the Educational Testing Service (ETS) web site, the official TOEFL web site. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to use. To help you, here are links to the most important information about the TOEFL:

• TOEFL at a Glance – a brief introduction to the TOEFL.
• TOEFL Tips – a complete description of the TOEFL, including descriptions of each section, the kinds of questions that are asked, the academic skills required, and the grading system used in the speaking and writing sections of the test.
• Take the TOEFL Tour – a tour of the TOEFL, which will show you exactly what you will see and experience when you take the TOEFL.
• The speaking and writing sections of the TOEFL are scored according rubrics, which describe the specific things the scorers look for. Here are the rubrics for the speaking and independent and integrated writing sections of the TOEFL.

Everyone who plans to take the TOEFL should be familiar with all of this information. The TOEFL Tour is especially important because it shows you exactly what to expect in each section of the test.

If you’re looking for a study guide to help you prepare for the TOEFL, I recommend The Official Guide to the TOEFL iBT. It concentrates on the academic skills that, in my experience, students need to work on the most.

What TOEFL score do I need?

Some students are unsure about the admissions requirements, including TOEFL scores, of the universities they’re interested in. A Google search can quickly solve this problem. If you want general information about admissions requirements for international students, use these search terms:

• (name of the university) admissions international

If you want to know the TOEFL requirement, try this:

• (name of the university) admissions TOEFL

Many graduate programs, and occasionally each department in a graduate program, have their own requirements. In that case, add the word “graduate” or the name of the specific program, such as “MBA,” as one of the search terms.

These searches have worked almost 100% of the time for my students and me.

Are you ready to take the TOEFL?

Not sure you’re ready to take the TOEFL? Or what part you need to work on? The best way to find out is to take the TOEFL practice test offered on the TOEFL web site. If you’re not ready, it will help you identify what you need to work on to get ready. Most of my students are doing this now, and it has been very helpful.

Doing your TOEFL homework

Do your own homework before beginning to prepare for the TOEFL. Other people may have good intentions, but we’re talking about your TOEFL score and your education, so you should take the responsibility to find the information you need.

One of the ways you can be sure you have the correct information is to work with an experienced, qualified tutor who knows the TOEFL and, hopefully, has college or university teaching experience.

If you want help with the TOEFL, I’d be happy to talk to you about tutoring. You can find out more about my tutoring services here.

Warren Ediger

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English students frequently ask me what to do about unfamiliar words when they read. Many of them feel obligated to do something, like look them up in a dictionary. They feel guilty if they do nothing. Today’s Expert Answer from Dr. Frank Smith will help you understand what happens when you meet a new word and what you can do about it.

Before we talk about your choices, let me describe what happens before you decide to do anything.

Fast-mapping

When you see a word for the first time, your brain goes into action immediately and automatically. According to Smith, your brain does something called “fast mapping.” It takes information from the text you’re reading – the sentence, the paragraph, the story or article – and gives the new word a possible meaning.

After that, each time you meet the word, your brain picks up a little more information about it. After you meet the word several times, your brain will have accumulated enough information about the word’s meaning for the word to become a usable part of your vocabulary. When that happens, we say that you have acquired, or picked up, the word.

Let’s see if we can put this into one sentence: Each time you see a word, information from the text you’re reading helps your brain accumulate, or collect, a little more of the word’s meaning until you get the full meaning of the word.

Your brain does its work automatically, but you have to make a decision. What is the best thing to do when you see a word you haven’t met before? Smith says that you have three choices.

Skip it and keep reading

First, you can skip the word – ignore it and continue to read. If you can make sense of, or understand, the text you’re reading, don’t stop. Keep reading. It’s not always necessary to know all the words in a text.

There are two reasons this is a good choice. First, if you stop and try to figure out every unfamiliar word, you interrupt the reading process and make understanding, learning, and memory more difficult. Even if you need the unfamiliar word to understand the text, read past it – for example, to the end of the paragraph – then go back and read the paragraph again. Rereading is a very effective way to pick up more meaning.

Remember, even if you skip a word, your brain doesn’t ignore it completely. Your understanding of the text you’re reading contributes to the fast mapping described earlier. So even if you skip a word, your brain picks up clues about its meaning and remembers them to help you understand the word in the future.

Guess its meaning

If you think you need the word to make sense of what you’re reading, Smith suggests that you guess the meaning of the word. There are two helpful strategies for doing that:

First, think about the meaning of the text you’re reading. Is there anything in the sentence, paragraph, or the rest of the story or article that might help you figure out the meaning of the word? If you take time to look around, you’ll often find help with the meaning of a word right there in the text.

Second, does the word look similar to a word you already know? Maybe it’s a different form of a familiar English word. Or maybe it’s similar to a word in your own language. Words that are similar to each other often have similar, or related, meanings.

Ask someone or …

Smith suggests one other action: ask someone to explain the meaning (in English, of course, not to just give you a translation!). But what if you have no one to ask?

If you really need to know a word, use a dictionary like the online Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Here’s why:

• It has English definitions that are easy to understand.
• It has example sentences for almost every definition.
• If a word has more than one meaning, it includes all the word meanings so you can find the one that fits the meaning of the text you’re reading.
• It has recorded pronunciations for most words so you can learn how to pronounce the word.

When should you use a dictionary? First, stop and use a dictionary if you have to know a word to understand the text you’re reading. But don’t stop unless it’s absolutely necessary! Second, if you’re curious about some of the words, choose 5-8 words and look them up after you finish reading.

Avoid using translating dictionaries. You will get the most benefit from using an English dictionary like the Longman.

A reminder

When you meet a new word, the best strategy is to continue reading. Don’t feel obligated to stop and look it up. Trust your brain to automatically begin to collect information about its meaning. Each time you see it, your brain collects more information until you know the word, and it becomes a usable part of your vocabulary.

Warren Ediger

Related articles:

• Inside the brain

References:

• Smith, Frank (2007) Reading FAQ.
• Smith, Frank (2006) Reading without Nonsense.

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