While reading Schmitt and Carter’s text The Lexical Advantages of Narrow Reading for Second Language Learners, I was reminded of my own personal experience as a foreign language learner. At one point during my teenage years, I had to learn a completely foreign language in a immersion context. The language being mandarin, I started with no background knowledge; I felt like a young child learning my alphabet all over again. I knew that I would learn the mandarin characters much faster by reading often, but I did not know where to start. By coincidence, I stumbled upon a newspaper geared towards teenage readers. As Schmitt and Carter write in their article, newspaper articles are full of extra lingual cues, and were therefore a lot easier to read than conventional novels. Not only were the subjects interesting, but I also learned a lot about my host country and its culture. The newspaper was produced weekly and I had the chance to experience what the authors call narrow reading as the subjects came up often in different articles.
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