Advanced Reading Practice

In this next lesson and the several that follow, you will find opportunities to practice and test advanced reading skills! I’ve attached historical documents (primary sources), novels excerpts, and plays. For those of you who are discouraged by reading presidential speeches or complicated literature, I have provided Swahili-written summaries or contextualizing facts about the reading to help you to learn key themes that you’ll see in the document.

You’ll notice that I’ve written the prefaces to the reading material in Swahili. After the source, there is an English variation so that learners not yet equipped to read Swahili have an English introduction to the material as well! Feel free to use it, should you run into trouble, but I encourage you to focus on context rather than mastery of every word. As you read the Swahili sources, if you stumble on a word or phrase that stifles your interpretation of the context, use this dictionary. However, if you’re working on developing your reading skills, I suggest you read every document (or a portion of it) one time through without assistance. You’ll be surprised what clicks when you return to it a second time around. At that point, a dictionary will help you address problem areas. When you’re done, practice you’re writing with your own distillation of the text!