“Reading comprehension,” or your ability to understand what you read, is a key skill that should be trained to make sure that you understand the words on the pages whenever you read an English book.

This article will help you figure out how to get better at this skill beyond just…reading more books.

I will help you learn English reading with smart strategies. You’ll discover exactly how to read English books in a way that will actually improve your skills.

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If you’re reading to improve your comprehension, you need to focus and study.

This means you need to make a special time for this reading without risk of being interrupted. You should try to spend at least 30 minutes every day on focused reading. 

Turn your reading process into a ritual:

If you have a specific process for, then your brain will know when you’re about to read and you’ll be more focused before you even start.

If you’re a beginner learner, choose an English dictionary that translates words into your native language. There are also learner’s dictionaries, which explain words using simple terms.

For more advanced learners, I recommend using a monolingual dictionary—one that has definitions only in English with no translations. Monolingual dictionaries force you to think in English rather than relying on your native language.

For a dictionary that translates English into multiple languages, check out WordReference. It covers dozens of languages such as French, German, Russian, Japanese and Dutch. Further, WordReference also has a monolingual English dictionary.

For online content, you can also use LingQ‘s built-in translation features. LingQ allows you to choose unknown words in any text, get an automatic translation and then convert those words to flashcards.

When you’re choosing books (and other texts) to read, keep two things in mind:

1. What you’re interested in

2. Your reading level

Whenever you can, you should read things that you enjoy. You should also choose books that are at an English level just above the one you’re most comfortable with. You want to challenge yourself just enough to learn new things, but not enough to get frustrated with your reading.

You can use this test from the British Council’s Learn English website to get a general idea of your reading level:

Not sure where to start? There are lots of places online where you can find recommendations for books to learn English reading:

I’ve also added a detailed list of reading recommendations per level at the end of this post.

Once you’ve picked a book, double-check its difficulty level by making sure that it has no more than 10% unknown words.

Count the number of words on a page or paragraph, and then count the number of words you don’t recognize. Divide the number of unknown words by the number of total words, multiply by 100 and you’ll see what percentage of words you don’t know.

Here’s a rough guide: 

There are two kinds of English reading that you have to practice: intensive reading and extensive reading. 

Intensive reading is when you try to understand every word on the page. 

This is the kind of reading you do when you have some time to focus. Most of the tips below are about how to make the most out of intensive reading. 

When you practice intensive reading, pick a fairly short text that interests you. If you have a really long text—or you just don’t care about the topic—you might give up before you finish.

Aside from intensive reading, you also need to do extensive reading, which simply means casually reading anything you see in English. Don’t stress. Don’t worry about what every word means.

Read a new recipe. Read an email. Read a blog post.

Read billboards along the highway. Read newspaper headlines.

It doesn’t matter what you read—just read in English. Anything. Everything.

The more extensive reading you do, the more comfortable you’ll be with reading in English. 

Fluency is how smoothly you can read. When you read in your head, you should have a certain rhythm to the words, understanding full sentences rather than going word for word. The words should flow together naturally, like when somebody is talking. 

To improve your fluency, look out for “sight words.” These are words that you should know by sight and should not have to think about how to read them.

Find a good list of sight words, like this one, and take about a minute or two every day to read the words as fast as you can.

English spelling very often doesn’t reflect the actual sounds of a word. When you read in English, the voice in your head can get stuck on new words that you don’t know how to pronounce.

Don’t be discouraged, however!

By learning common spelling conventions, that reading voice will maintain the flow of English and you’ll improve your overall reading ability:

There are loads of other spelling rules, so don’t be afraid to improve your English spelling. A little effort will go a long way for your English reading comprehension!

It’s important to be smart about which words you look up as you read. I recommend looking up words that are repeated more than three times in a passage, or words that appear crucial to the meaning of a sentence.

In other words, don’t look up every single unknown word while you’re reading. Think about it—it’ll get boring and break up the flow of reading.

When you read a text for the first time, underline or highlight unknown words.

Once you’re done reading, go back and identify the repeated words and words that are crucial to understanding. Now you can look those up and write down translations or definitions.

Finally, read the text again with your word list and watch as you understand the text more fully.

A great way to build up your vocabulary and reading fluency is to create flashcards of important words. But don’t just stop there: review these flashcards often.

While reading, keep your word lists or flashcards handy. You can refer to these if that word comes up again while reading for fast translation.

As you come across these words while reading new content, move them to the back of your flashcard pile. This counts as review, and you don’t need to review words if you feel you’ve already learned them!

Anki is a great app for creating your own digital flashcards and accessing them on the go. 

Aside from making flashcards, you can use a language journal (notebook) for practice.

In the pages of your journal, try writing sentences with your new English vocabulary. Make your own definition for each English word you’ve learned. Use colored pencils to draw pictures of what the words mean.

Every once in a while, look back at older pages in your language journal. Review words to keep your memories of them strong. And feel proud of how much you’ve learned!

Taking notes and asking yourself questions can help you really understand an English text.  

Before you read, here are a few questions you can ask yourself to prepare:

While you’re reading, try asking these questions: 

After reading, the questions below can also get you think about what you did and did not understand:

The gist is the overall meaning. Practice using clues to get the gist of a text quickly and effectively.

For example:

Reading can be tiring, so break it up into manageable chunks (pieces). Aim for between one and three paragraphs to start. As you build your skills, you can start reading with longer and longer chunks of text.

You can also simply break up your reading by time. In particular, I recommend trying the Pomodoro method. For every 25 minutes of reading, take a five-minute break to give your brain a rest.

After reading a text, you can write a short summary of what you’ve read. This can just be a couple of sentences that present the main ideas.

Writing a summary is a great way to reinforce what the text was about as well as use new vocabulary in context. I like to write summaries down in my notebook and then underline the new vocabulary that I learned from reading the text.

Writing summaries will also help you notice any parts of the text that you didn’t fully understand, so you can go back and re-read. 

Call upon an English-speaking friend or conversation partner to help you understand what you read.

You can explain the text to them. Your friend could then ask you questions about what you’ve read.

By talking about what you’ve read with a fluent English speaker, you can make sure that you understood the text. Another bonus is that you’ll practice listening and speaking in English.

Sometimes reading a text just once isn’t enough to understand it. Rereading is great for finding things you might have missed the first time and reviewing new words. 

Try these out:

Every time you read something, you understand more of it. When you want to get the most out of your reading, try reading three or more times:

For more structured practice, you can do reading comprehension exercises, which are designed to test how much you understand and improve your reading ability.

Generally, these exercises start with a short text. Then you have to answer multiple choice or fill-in-the-blanks questions, or even longer written responses about the text.  

Whatever your level, here are some useful places to find online reading comprehension exercises:

To find even more online, look up “ESL reading comprehension quiz.”

Today we don’t just read books and newspapers. We read blogs, emails, Tweets and chats. The more you read anything in English, the better you’ll get at the language.

Magazine Line is a good place to go to find digital or print magazines on just about any subject. They give you lower prices on magazine subscriptions, and you may be able to save even more if you’re a student.

You can also check out aggregators—websites that take news and interesting articles and put them together for you to look through. A couple of useful aggregators are Mix, which helps you find new websites based on your interests, and Digg, which collects interesting stories from around the Internet onto one page.

It might seem strange, but another great way to practice reading is to watch English videos with subtitles or transcripts.

That way, you will read the words while hearing how a native speaker says them. Because English is not a phonetic language, the subtitles remind you how to spell a certain word, regardless of the sound.

Watching movies and videos is probably the most fun and interactive way of learning English. I don’t know about you, but I spent a lot of my younger years watching “Friends” and learned a lot of English from the TV show.

You can do similar things with TED Talks or Netflix. 

FluentU videos also have full, accurate subtitles as well as transcripts. You can pick a video that you’re interested in to make this a more engaging experience, like a movie trailer or a clip from a popular show. You can also pause the video and check the definition of any word by hovering your mouse over it in the subtitles. 

Read the transcript before you watch the video, then read along with the subtitles as the video plays. Since you have to keep up with the speed of the video, you’ll be training your fluency this way.

Do you know that ChatGPT, the chatbot that made waves all over the internet because of how well it can communicate, read Reddit threads to teach itself language?

Forums like Reddit, Quora and Yahoo Answers contain English in its most natural forms, as it is all written casually by native speakers. Even if there are spelling and grammar mistakes, conversations are mostly enlightening, natural and full of everyday words. 

Aside from forums, you can add some personality and fun to your English reading practice with blogs in English. They discuss all kinds of topics in a lively and friendly way. You can even be part of the conversation—and practice your English writing skills—by leaving a comment now and then!

Perhaps the most important tip to learn English reading is to make sure you read consistently. Remember, a little bit of reading every day is better than reading a lot once a month. Aim to create a reading habit!

If you become frustrated or bored, I suggest changing your reading material. Reading things you’re interested in will improve your reading skills tremendously, and the best way to become better at reading English is to read what you enjoy.

Now that you know how to maximize your English reading, I’ll show you what kind of English texts would work well for you based on your level:

You can find long reads on the website like Longreads and Reddit’s Longreads subreddit. My favorite source for long reads is The Guardian because the articles are also recorded and published as podcasts.

Try reading and studying a few poems perfect for learning English. You can also watch slam poetry performances with transcripts, like “A love poem for lonely prime numbers” and “If I should have a daughter…”

Most classic books are available for free to read online, on cool websites like Project Gutenberg. Some of my favorites include “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “Emma” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

Learning to read English might take time, but it pays off a lot because you’ll have so much fun, widen your cultural knowledge and improve other skills at the same time.

Pick the reading tips and resources that suit you best or try all of them out to bring your English to the level of fluency!

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)