I love reading and I read just for the enjoyment of it. However, I am also very aware of the importance of reading. I am an English tutor (please don't judge my grammar; I'm sure it is not perfect) and I tutor many students who are still learning English. Doing this always makes me think of how hard English is as a language as well as how easy it is for me to speak and write it since I have grown up using it my whole life. Since I started loving to read books when I was little, I attribute a lot of how I write to reading. I have thought of many things that I feel reading does and does not do.
1. Reading makes writing easier. In order to write, you need to understand how sentences are structured in the new language. The first thing that we always did in my Spanish classes was to read a dialogue from our book. Speaking the language does help too but being able to see the structure and read it out loud is what really helps someone to understand a new language. When I was younger, I had at least five books that I was reading at all times. Because of this, I was able to understand how to structure sentences to sound the best and make the most sense; granted, I still don't know everything. Even though being an English tutor has made me more aware of the rules that go along with the language, before I was a tutor who knew a lot of the rules, I was still able to understand the correct way to word a sentence so people would understand. This was because I saw how words were put together on a page.
2. Reading does not make you a better speller. This was another thing that I learned from my childhood. My mother likes to tell the story of how I would spell "spelling test" different every single week at the top of my spelling exams. When she went in to talk with the teacher for parent teacher conferences, the teacher said I would spell better when I read more. Sixteen years later, I have learned how to spell better, but that was mostly by trial and error. I am, by far, not the best speller (my husband will attest to that) and I never really got better until I typed papers on the computer or sent out text messages that corrected my misspellings and allowed me to see the correct way to spell them. While you are reading, you don't pay attention to how words are spelled, just what the collective words mean to the story.
3. Reading can give you a better vocabulary if you do it correctly. I am also not known to have a wide vocabulary, which I am finally coming to terms with. Although reading can help you to understand words that you haven't seen before, you have to first read books that will stretch your vocabulary. For me, many books I read are not very good for stretching my vocabulary because they are either beneath my reading level or right at my reading level. In order to understand more words, you have to know the definition and see how to use them in context. Now, I am not saying you should go out and buy a book that has a ton of words you don’t know; that doesn't help. You just have to buy a book that will have a few new words that you consciously pay attention to in order to find the meaning in them. That is where I fail. If I do not know the word, I can still understand the meaning of the story, so I do not try and figure out its actual meaning by looking in the dictionary.
I know there are many other things that you may think that reading does or does not do. These are just the ones that stick out to me the most in my own life as well as in the lives of the people I tutor.
