Name: Read, Understand, and Remember! Improve your reading skills with the KWL Method
Uploaded: 2017-05-14T15:14:20.000Z
Duration: 11 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Future simple

My name is Emma, and in today's video I am going to teach you how to be a better reader.

To-infinitive

Are there any things that are very difficult for you to read?

Maybe you have to read something in English and you really don't understand what's happening

Or maybe you're in university and you're taking a very hard course and you can't read the

textbook because it's really difficult and you don't know what's happening.

Well, if you're having difficulty reading or even if you just want to remember what

you read more and be a better studier, this video is for you.

So first let's look at some things students might be reading that might be causing difficulty.

Some students in their universities they have to read textbooks.

If you go to university or college, or also high school, you have to do a lot of reading

and you have to do a lot of complicated reading, especially for sciences, maths, history.

I'm going to teach you how to read these books better.

Sometimes you'll be reading the newspaper and it's difficult, especially in another language.

So if you're reading a newspaper and, you know, you want to be better at reading it,

There's a lot of great things on the internet to read, and so this will also help you if

you look reading things from the internet.

Journals, for anyone who's a professional, whether you're a doctor, a nurse, a historian,

or if you're in university or college, a lot of the times you have to read something called

a journal, which is something for professionals to read about their field.

These things can be very difficult to read, so if you're reading these, this is a great

Although I wouldn't recommend using this technique on the actual exam, I think it's great for

your practice tests and I'll tell you why a bit later.

So you can use this when you're practicing for the TOEFL and IELTS.

And finally, if you're reading Shakespeare.

When I read Shakespeare I had no idea what was going on.

It was very confusing, all of the old English.

There are also a lot of books that can be very, very hard to read.

So these techniques will really work for you for any of these situations and many more.

So before I teach you about the KWL technique, I just want you to think about reading for a second.

A lot of people when they pick up a book, that's all they do.

They open it up and they start reading right away, and then they close the book and then

a lot of the times they don't really remember anything they read or they don't understand

I like to think of reading how I think of jogging or running.

So if we look here, I have the word "running" or "jogging".

If you like exercise, any type of exercise kind of follows this format.

What a good reader does is they have a warm up period.

So if you think about running, before you go running you usually stretch.

Maybe you'll do a little bit of movement to get your heart pumped.

For exercise, people then usually run or jog for a certain amount of time, and then afterwards

they have what we call a cooldown period.

So, "cooldown" is usually when somebody wants to slow their heartrate, so maybe they walk

instead of run, maybe they do more stretches, but they don't just stop what they're doing.

They slowly, you know, do slower activities before they stop jogging or running.

So if you think about reading like exercise, you should also have a warm up,

and then you read, and then the cooldown.

This is the main idea of the KWL method, and I'm going to teach you exactly how we can

The point of this method is it will really, really, really help you to understand what

You're going to understand a lot more, you're going to also remember a lot more.

And for those of you in university, and college, and high school, you're going to have to do

less studying because if you read something right the first time, you probably won't have

to keep going back again and again and again.

So using this method at the beginning will save you a lot of time.

So now let's look at an example of how we can use the KWL method.

Well, usually when I read something difficult, I make a chart like this.

What do you already know about what you're going to read?

"W" stands for: "What do you want to know?"

So usually we write a bunch of questions under here, and this is also a part of the warm up.

You know, it makes you pay attention more to what you're reading.

In this area you are going to write: What did you learn from what you've just read?

This is going to really help you with your memory especially.

What are some interesting things you learned?

Sometimes "L" is based off of what you wanted to know.

Maybe you had a question here, and then you can write, you know, the answer to your question