In the contemporary society, most people believe that the reading, which is done by the student themselves, is as important as or more important than the reading assigned by their teachers. However, others hold a negative view towards this opinion. As far as I am concerned, the reading that a student dose on his own is as significant as the reading assigned by his teacher. And in my essay, I would like to use some specific points to support my idea.First of all, reading has a positive effect on students. A student can improve a specific type of ability, such as reading skill and writing skill, by doing more reading. Take a child, who reads newspaper every day, as an example. He finds that he can read much faster than his classmates in the exam. Therefore, after-class reading helps to improve his reading skill. On the other hand, if he does not read newspaper each day, he would not establish such ability.Moreover, students also can learn from reading. My younger cousin is a prime example. He loves to read scientific magazines when he has leisure time. And he also learns a lot of knowledge, such as the consequences of the green house effect and the formation of the earth, which he cannot learn from the classroom. Nevertheless, without reading the magazines and reading the books which are required by his teacher only, he would not have such great amount of knowledge.In conclusion, students do reading on their own can help to improve the reading skill and learn more knowledge, which brings a number of benefits to students lives directly and indirectly. For those reasons, I definitely agree that a student do the reading on his own is much more important than doing the reading assigned by his teacher.