If the book or magazine is too hard, or not really interesting, stop reading and find something else. The goal is to find material that is so engaging, and so easy, that you will forget that it is in another language. You want reading material that requires no self-discipline to read.

Carry the book or magazine with you everywhere. You may feel that you don't have time to read, but if you carry your book with you, the world will conspire to give you time. Take your book out when you are standing in line, waiting for a bus, and when waiting for service. (It may be my imagination, but I have the feeling that waiters, hotel clerks, and other service personnel suddenly recognize your existence and became very eager to help when they see you reading.)

I have been doing this myself. For the last five years, I have been ordering and reading Star Trek novels in French and German from Amazon, translations from English. They are inauthentic, have no cultural information, and make little contribution to my intellectual life. But they are easy to read (I have a great deal of background knowledge in this area), and very pleasurable. Narrow reading works.

References

Cho, K.S. and Krashen, S. 1994. Acquisition of vocabulary from the Sweet Valley Kids series. Journal of Reading 37: 6620667.

Cho, K.S. and Krashen, S. 1995. From Sweet Valley Kids to Harlequins in one year. California English 1,1: 18-19.

Dupuy, B. 1999. Narrow listening: An alternative way to develop listening comprehension in the foreign language classroom. System 24(1):97-100.

Krashen, S. 1996. The case for narrow listening. System 24(1): 97-100.

LaBrant, L. 1958. An evaluation of free reading. In C. Hunnicutt and W. Iverson (Eds.), Research in the Three R's. New York: Harper and Brothers, pp. 154-161.

Lamme, L. 1976. Are reading habits and abilities related? Reading Teacher 30: 21-27.

Rodrigo, V. and Krashen, S. 1996. La aplicación del argumento de la audición enfocada en el Aula de Clase. Granada English Teaching Assocation, 4:2): 71-75.

Yang, A. 2001. reading and the non-academic learner: A mystery solved. System 29(4):451-466.

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