If you turn your attention to it, however, you can still hear yourself making the sounds of the words in your head. Speed reading experts claim that subvocalization is the bottleneck that slows down your reading. If you can learn to just recognize words visually without saying them in your inner voice, you can read much faster. Here the evidence is clear: subvocalization is necessary to read well.
Even expert speed readers do it, they just do it a bit faster than untrained people do. We can check this because that inner voice sends faint communication signals to the vocal cords, as a residue of your internal monolog, and those signals can be measured objectively. So reading faster means being able to use this inner voice faster, not eliminating it. To further that, expert speed readers who were studied also subvocalized, they just did it faster.
The other main recommendation I made in my speed reading article was using a pointer. This means moving your finger or a pen to underline the text as you read it. This technique is supposed to help you make eye fixations and reduce the random wandering of the eye which can waste time.
In my research for this article, I did find a couple factors that were associated with better reading speed, without sacrificing comprehension. Skimming is covering the text too fast to read everything fully. One study found that skimming a text before going on to reading it, improved comprehension in the majority of cases. Fluent recognition of words was one of the major slowing points for readers. Subvocalization, that mythical nemesis of speed readers, is slower on unfamiliar words. If you want to speed up reading, learning to recognize words faster seems to improve your reading speed.
It also matters for technical documents or prose which uses unfamiliar vocabulary. That will slow my reading speed down. The best way to improve fluency is to read more. Part of the reason skimming first might appear to help is that it allows you to map out a document. Knowing how an article or book is structured, then, allows you to pay more attention to the things you think are important. Thinking about this before you start reading allows you to prime yourself to pay attention when you see words and sentences that are related.
I read a lot of books unsure about what I want to discover in them. However a lot of bland, necessary reading in our lives fits this type. Speeding it up might be worthwhile if it leaves us more time for reading with curiosity. When I was in school, I needed to read most textbooks in a way that I could retain nearly every fact and idea I encountered later.
Here cognitive science offers some suggestions. A principle of memory is that we remember what we think about. Students who are visual learners also have a leg up when learning to read. On the other hand, students who have visual difficulty or other learning obstacles such as poor correspondence between hand and eye, might find the process of learning to read frustrating — especially if being taught using traditional methods.
Curiously, it has been discovered that dyslexic or ADD students who do boost their reading speed come to enjoy the reading process far more than they did when they were struggling.
The increased reading speed allows them to process information faster and that increases their ability to maintain interest and focus on the material.
In fact, this ability to focus on the material, to take it in and to retain it is the whole point of increasing reading speed, no matter who the reader might be. It has been argued by some that the process of pushing for greater reading speed lowers comprehension. This is both true and untrue, and the threshold for reading with good comprehension is different for different people, and changes with the amount of reading practice.
For example, your average Kindergarten graduate should be able to read at around ten words per minute. Students from homes where books are read, including being read aloud to the student, are likely to have a larger speaking vocabulary. They also have arrived at school knowing that information and stories are contained in books and are likely to be excited about learning to read the words for themselves. By the middle of the year in first grade , a student should read around 23 words per minute.
In second grade this should have increased to 72 wpm, by grade three to 92 wpm, grade four wpm, and by grade five. Speed increases continue steadily through middle school, and by grade 8, they should be reading around words per minute. For most students, speed increases will continue more slowly through high school as youngsters pursue other interests, but they should continue to progress steadily toward the average adult reading rate of , or better.
Enjoyable practice has a great deal of influence on reading speed and comprehension. Sometimes the difference between a reader and a non-reader is simply finding material that is appealing to the student.
Make no mistake about it, reading is a skill that requires practice. It is a visual, kinetic and cognitive skill, which means that different people are likely to practice reading at varying skill levels. Reading for at least fifteen minutes a day has the potential to increase reading skills. If the reading material is enjoyable to the reader, those fifteen minutes will breeze by, instead of being a laborious chore, and might even stretch into an hour or more of pleasurable activity.
Each reader will have different levels of reading, as well. A good reader, who has a cruising speed of words per minute, can quickly read through fiction or magazine articles that are of interest. However, dense textbook material that is heavy with new vocabulary and facts is likely to slow any reader from his or her top reading speed. So, what constitutes reading speed? For a new reader, who is puzzling out words one at a time, it could be one or two words a minute, and then a burst of reading speed as he or she puts the words together in a sentence.
People who are not habitual readers might struggle along below their normal speaking pace, especially if they are vocalizing the words while they read. Readers who cruise along in the reading speed do not necessarily read every word in each paragraph.
They have learned to read in chunks, and often form pictures in their minds as they read, so a novel or even an interesting bit of non-fiction will unfold as if it were a video. In fact, reading speed is affected by the medium which is being read.
Slightly different skills are needed to read a rolling television script, a computer screen, an electronic tablet, the screen of a cell phone, a printed book or even a newspaper. The medium is held differently or perhaps not held at all , the words display differently, and the information is formatted differently. Some speed reading programs display text one word at a time, challenging the reader to immediately recognize the word and associate it with the previous words to develop comprehension.
With all these things in mind, we can come back and say that many literate adults read at an average reading pace of around to words per minute. Most of us are capable of learning to read comfortably at a much faster pace, it just takes a little training to push beyond a familiar comfort zone to take advantage of that ability to think at a rate of words per minute or more.
Reading at a faster pace with comprehension and recall might require daily practice. This often means pushing to a higher reading rate, just to develop speed, but then dropping back to a lower rate to acquire information or to enjoy a story.
In addition, even though vocalization or sub-vocalization can be a good learning tool, as can using a pointer or tracing words with a finger, these helpers must be left behind before higher speeds can be realized. Motivation for developing a greater reading speed can also be a factor. It can be for pleasure — to be able to read the best-selling books before they get turned into movies, or it can be for profit — because being able to absorb large amounts of material quickly is helpful in school and on the job.
We live in an age of communication and information. We stand at the edge of an ocean of knowledge, with a small cup — our ability to read. The ability to quickly read and comprehend books, articles and other written materials would be life-changing for a lot of us.
A slew of cheap apps claiming to teach the technique would like you to think that it is teachable. For some context: most of us tend to read at about words per minute. Speed readers claim to hit around words per minute. To get a better idea of whether these claims have research to back them up, Lifehacker spoke with professor and eye tracking expert Keith Rayner, Ph. Before we can talk about speed reading, we need to lay down the specifics of how we tend to read and comprehend text normally.
Slate breaks down what we know about reading:. When you factor out the amount of time spent thinking through complex and unfamiliar concepts—a rarity when people read for pleasure—reading is an appallingly mechanical process. You look at a word or several words. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at.
That takes roughly 0. Add all these fixations and saccades and comprehension pauses together and you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between and words per minute. Speed readers supposedly shorten how long they fixate on a word. They tend to do this by cutting down on subvocalization , the end goal being faster than the 0. Skimming is glancing through text to find important parts to read.
Meta guiding is an older technique.
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