解放前，民国教育家、文学家夏丏尊先生，同教育家叶圣陶先生合著《阅读与写作》一书，书中谈到英语阅读教育需要注意的地方，甚为精彩，摘录一段如下：
诸君读英文的时候，曾经读过“龟兔赛跑”的故事吧。诸君读过这故事，如果让注意力为内容所牵绊，只记得兔最先怎样自负、怎样疏忽、怎样熟睡、龟怎样努力、怎样胜过了兔等等一大串，而忘却了本课里所有的生字、难句，及别种文字上的表达方式，那么结果就等于只听到“龟兔赛跑”的故事，并没有学到英文。
老先生的论述，一针见血。我看到小学 5、6 年级孩子，在家长督促下，边查字典，边啃原版书，甚是辛苦，毅力感人。可惜，孩子啃完书之后，仅能了解故事梗概，书中大量英文难点，并没有得到解决。换言之，孩子仅仅看了一个外国故事，少了很多语言上的收获。
我在教学中，特别强调孩子在自主阅读原版书之前，一定先“踏踏实实理解几本原版书”。道理很浅显：“没有理解，就没有能力；没有能力，就没有兴趣；没有兴趣，就不爱读书”。
孩子从中文阅读世界，渡到英文阅读世界，是艰难的一跃，更是伟大的一跃。这个过程，来不得半点浮躁，来不得半点马虎。
下面的文字，选自《哈利波特与魔法石》第 10 课，孩子反复听我讲读，是独立通读类似文字的基础。
Harry lay in his dark cupboard much later, wishing he had a watch. He didn't know what time it was and he couldn't be sure the Dursleys were asleep yet. Until they were, he couldn't risk sneaking to the kitchen for some food.
He'd lived with the Dursleys almost ten years, ten miserable years, as long as he could remember, ever since he'd been a baby and his parents had died in that car crash. He couldn't remember being in the car when his parents had died. Sometimes, when he strained his memory during long hours in his cupboard, he came up with a strange vision: a blinding flash of green light and a burning pain on his forehead. This, he supposed, was the crash, though he couldn't imagine where all the greenlight came from. He couldn't remember his parents at all. His aunt and uncle never spoke about them, and of course he was forbidden to ask questions. There were no photographs of them in the house.
When he had been younger, Harry had dreamed and dreamed of some unknown relation coming to take him away, but it had never happened; the Dursleys were his only family. Yet sometimes he thought (or maybe hoped) that strangers in the street seemed to know him. Very strange strangers they were, too. A tiny man in a violet top hat had bowed to him once while out shopping with Aunt Petunia and Dudley. After asking Harry furiously if he knew the man, Aunt Petunia had rushed them out of the shop without buying anything. A wild-looking old woman dressed all in green had waved merrily at him once on a bus. A bald man in a very long purple coat had actually shaken his hand in the street the other day and then walked away without a word. The weirdest thing about all these people was the way they seemed to vanish the second Harry tried to get a closer look. >>李岑老师的节目<<