Bored with doing grammar exercises? Try reading instead.

I have nothing against grammar exercises. In fact, I have another post I’m writing in which I’ll be recommending some useful grammar books, and sharing how to best work with the grammar exercises in them! But I do get that for a lot of us, these bring back memories of an old-fashioned classroom where perhaps not much happens besides. If you’re tired of these types of tasks, I say fair enough. Here’s what you should do instead.

Read extensively

When my students read in class, they usually read intensively. This means they must pay attention to each sentence in a text; they have to be able to summarise it, or answer questions about it; if there are words they’re not familiar with, they might ask me about their meaning. This means we can never get through a very long text – there isn’t enough time.

Meanwhile, reading extensively means reading longer texts–articles and blog posts, but also whole magazines and books–without bothering with every little detail. When you read extensively, you read because you’re interested in what the text has to say, or because you’re having fun, and learning English is just an additional bonus. You might not understand every word or even every sentence, but you don’t let that slow you down: you’re reading faster, you’re reading more, and you’re not getting tired as quickly.

Research has shown that reading extensively in a foreign language is one of the best ways to learn. It is particularly useful for expanding your vocabulary, but it can do wonders for your grammar, too: the more examples of correct sentences you see, the more likely you are to make them yourself.

Does it matter what you read?

If you’re a beginner, you probably won’t learn very much if you pick up Shakespeare. The level of the language in your reading should generally be about a level higher than your current level. For instance, if you are a B2 student, you could look at B2-level texts to get started, then seek out C1-level texts to challenge yourself more.

A good place to start might be to explore graded readers. These are books which have been adapted to a particular level: certain difficult words have been removed and some more advanced structures have been simplified. You can get these at some libraries, as well as language bookshops.

Another option would be to look into magazines for English learners, which usually offer articles for several levels.

Authentic texts written for native speakers will vary between C1 and C2 level. However, you could start by picking up a comic book (the pictures will help!), a children’s novel (usually less complex) or an old favourite (you’ll already know the story).

Reading Winnie the Pooh

Just because you’re reading extensively doesn’t mean you shouldn’t occasionally stop and think about the language used in the book. This can really boost your understanding of the story, as well as help you gain a lot of new vocabulary and grammar fairly easily. Here’s how some of my students and I have done it with a chapter of Winnie the Pooh, a childhood favourite.

Think of some language to start with

First, my students and I looked at pictures from the chapter we were going to read, and we tried to predict what might happen. As we did, we found we came up with several words and structures, such as flood, rescue and stranded. We also made sure we knew the names of the characters in English.

Here’s how you do it: look through the book you’re going to read, or simply look at the cover. Think of words you’re likely to find inside. Do you know them all in English? If you’re about to read a crime story, for example, it will be useful to know words such as victim, murder weapon or investigator.

All the image and text excerpts come from a wonderful bilingual edition of Winnie the Pooh. It has gorgeous illustrations and allows you to read the stories both in Polish and the original English. You can purchase it here.

Read through and notice interesting features

Then, I asked my students to read the chapter and see if we were right about our predictions. I also asked them to make a note of up to three passages they found interesting. These could be passages that used unfamiliar words or grammar structures, passages they could not understand, or passages that used language in a way they liked.

If you’d like to do the same, remember to limit yourself. If you start making a note of every new word or interesting sentence, you will get tired very quickly. Set yourself a goal, for example, I will make a note of one interesting passage per chapter.

Use what you found

Here are our notes exploring some of the passages we picked up on. Notice how we used the first passage to come up with our own examples. This way, we’re taking the grammar and putting it into practice straight away, which helps us remember it better.

Why is it useful to learn grammar this way?

One thing that grammar exercises sometimes aren’t very good at is showing us how a particular structure works in practice. If you find it in a text, however, you have a very real example of how it works, and you can see the context of the story around it. I think it can make the grammar seem more real and meaningful.

It’s also helpful because you’re not trying to learn too much at once. Notice our notes on inversion. Inversion is a big and challenging part of English grammar that gives many advanced students trouble. However, if you’re learning it from reading, you don’t need to worry about every possible sentence that can use inversion. Instead, you can focus on how inversion can be used after the word never at the start of a sentence. This is easier to remember, and less overwhelming.

Finally, grammar in texts tends to repeat. This means that if we found one example of inversion in Winnie the Pooh, it’s very likely there’ll be more examples in other chapters. Every time you see another example, you can think to yourself, oh, look: that’s inversion, like in that sentence with NEVER. It is a natural way to revise what you’ve learnt, and to see the same structure in a new context, which leads to a better understanding of it!

Do you already read and listen to English plenty, but feel like your grammar is still the same as before? Next week’s post should give you some ideas as to why that might be.

And if you’re looking for inspiration on where to get your reading material, make sure to follow me on Facebook or Instagram – I’ll be posting some tips over the course of the week!