What role does reading play in maintaining language proficiency

Reading plays a crucial role in maintaining language proficiency by continuously exposing learners to the language in context, which strengthens vocabulary, comprehension, and overall linguistic skills. It enhances language comprehension abilities and helps maintain or improve fluency, vocabulary size, and grammatical knowledge through regular engagement with both authentic and adapted texts. Reading also supports cognitive skills like syntactic awareness and inference-making, which are essential for language proficiency retention.

Key points on the role of reading in maintaining language proficiency include:

• Reading helps reinforce vocabulary acquisition and retention, which directly impacts speaking and writing abilities. Continuous reading enlarges vocabulary and improves word knowledge. ^{1, 2, 3}
• Regular reading practice maintains and improves language comprehension skills, a core component of language proficiency, especially for second language learners. ^{4, 5}
• Exposure to varied sentence structures and authentic language use in texts promotes syntactic awareness and grammar skills. ^{6, 7}
• Reading promotes sustained motivation and engagement, which are critical for long-term language maintenance. ^{8, 9}
• Reading supports the development not only of passive skills like comprehension but also indirectly enhances active skills such as speaking by providing extensive input. ^{10, 1}

In summary, reading acts as a key tool for sustaining and advancing language proficiency by providing continuous linguistic input, enriching vocabulary, reinforcing grammar, and supporting cognitive and metacognitive skills essential for language use and understanding. ^{2, 5, 1, 4, 6}

References

• Developing Speaking Skills through Reading

• A systematic review of EFL research on the impact of reading comprehension on students’ vocabulary retention, and the relation between reading and vocabulary size

• Impact of extensive reading to develop speaking skills

• Simple view of second language reading: A meta-analytic structural equation modeling approach

• Reading, linguistic, and metacognitive skills: are they reciprocally related past the first school years?

• At the Core of Comprehension: An Exploration of Complex Sentence Structures and the Relationship between Syntactic Awareness and Reading Comprehension

• Role of a literary text in teaching reading for professional communication

• CRITERIA FOR SELECTING TEXTS FOR READING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES AND MODERN PRACTICES

• Extensive Reading to Promote ESL Learners’ Reading Motivation: A Literature Review

• Exploring the Roles of Reading Strategies on Speaking English Language

• Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment

• The Role and Development of Supplementary Reading Materials in EFL Teaching

• Influence of Family Language Policies on Language Proficiency across Generations: A Study of Russian-Speaking Families in Germany

• The influence of cognitive ability in Chinese reading comprehension: can working memory updating change Chinese primary school students’ reading comprehension performance?

• Enhancing University Students’ Arabic Language Skills Through Social Media: A Case Study of TikTok

• Language comparison of three models of reading strategy

• The Power of Pleasure Reading: A Narrative Inquiry of Proficient Non-English Learners

• The effects of EFL reading comprehension and certain learning-related factors on EFL learners’ reading strategy use

• Using Authentic Materials for Extensive Reading to Promote English Proficiency.

• Self-directed extensive reading with social support: effect on reading and learning performance of high and low English proficiency students

• The Effects of Control for Ability Level on EFL Reading of Graded

• Predictors of Successful Reading Comprehension in Bilingual Adults: The Role of Reading Strategies and Language Proficiency

• READING COMPREHENSION: THE SIGNIFICANCE, FEATURES AND STRATEGIES

• The effect of linguistic comprehension instruction on generalized language and reading comprehension skills: A systematic review

• The Role of Reading in English Language Classrooms

• The Effect of Extensive and Intensive Reading Strategies on EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Improvement