What is most likely to affect your success at school or at a job? The ability to read. And that goes for your kids too. The declining literacy  of our society has been a main concern of educators for a while now, and yet things are not getting better. In most cases, how well we learn to read will depend largely on our exposure  to language as children. If we hear people around us talking about all kinds of subjects as children, we naturally pick up the words and phrases they use. If we pick up a lot of words, we will learn to read better. Much of the traditional advice to struggling readers, theses days, seems to include developing "cognitive strategies" . In this way, readers are asked to centre more, to think, to be interested and ask questions, to analyze, to predict, to reason, and to check their understanding, or worse still to answer questions of what they have read. In other words they are asked to become self-conscious  readers. I do not agree with this approach. Here are my several strategies for reading improvement. Read about things that interest you. If you are interested in what you are reading about, the words will come alive, and you will understand better. The more you read, the better you will become at reading. Just get started and it will become a habit, as long as you are interested in what you are reading. Read material that is at your level or just a little difficult for you. Read material that you find easy to read, or just a little challenging. Looking up many unknown words in a dictionary is dull, and the results of the dictionary search are quickly forgotten.  _  If you can hear the new words and phrases that you are reading, you will have an easier time understanding and remembering them. Hearing the rhythm of someone reading a text will help your own reading. Don't worry about what you don't understand. Most of your reading should be for pleasure. You can still enjoy reading without understanding all of what you read. You may even understand some things in your own personal way. Unfortunately not all reading is just for pleasure. When you are reading a textbook or report or other material for school, you may need to underline, take notes and read some parts over again. However, if you have developed the habit of reading for pleasure, you will find that the skills you need will come naturally, and that you will understand a lot better than before. What is the purpose of the author in writing the passage?
To tell us some ways to improve reading ability. To show that poor literacy has been a big problem. To teach us how to look for fun in reading. To tell us some ways to pick up new words and phrases.