Introduction

Welcome to the English Reading Training course. It suits anyone who wants to read English faster and better — high-school students, university students, working professionals, and hobbyists alike. In this course you will learn a range of useful reading techniques and strengthen your English, whether you read articles, novels, and papers, or answer exam questions. After finishing it you can continue with other, more advanced courses that focus on specific fields.

To read well in a foreign language, the process, seen from a distance, is simply this: first understand the vocabulary and solve the problems at the word level; once that is done, words naturally combine into sentences; then sentences are integrated into layers, letting you summarize the idea each one carries (language exists to convey information and to communicate). Beyond the information itself lie the inference layer and the purpose layer — that is, grasping what is implied between the lines and distinguishing inferences supported by the text from over-reading. The purpose layer is about understanding the writer's intent and what they set out to argue.

If you solve the word level but not the word-to-sentence level, you end up reading one word at a time and piecing them together — slow and inefficient. If you solve word-to-sentence but not the relations between sentences and the main idea, you see the trees but not the forest: you forget the previous sentence by the time you read the next, you keep rereading, your working memory does little work, and you waste time.

And if all of the above is solved but inference, purpose, and tone are not, you cannot tell what a sentence is really conveying, what is implied, or whether the speaker is being sarcastic or genuinely praising you — so none of the layers can be skipped. Everything, then, rests on the vocabulary layer. Starting from a basic vocabulary, let us talk about how to further improve the problems you meet at that layer.

Introduction: The Big Picture and Layers of Foreign-Language Reading