Speed Reading
Obstacles
Obstacles to speed reading:
- reading word-by-word
- rereading words, sentences or lines
- saying the words in your head or out loud while reading
Excellent readers are not only speed readers but they also remember and understand most of what they read. So, the key to improving reading skills is to address both speed and comprehension. By improving both how fast your students read and how much they understand and remember, they will become excellent readers.
Word-by-Word
In order to help our students eyes move more quickly across they page, we need to arm them with the skill of blocking. To understand blocking, it is important to understand how the eye moves across a line of words. Every time the eye stops to soak up the information on the page is called an eye fixation. When the eye stops on every word, then there are a lot of eye fixations per line. Blocking is the idea that they eye can see and understand more than one word at a time. By grouping words together in a block, they eye stops only once, but the eye “reads” three or four words during that stop. By stopping the eye fewer times, there are fewer eye fixations per line and thus the eye reaches the end of the line faster.
For example:
#1 The bear went over the mountain.
- If the eye stops on each word, then there are six eye fixations for that sentence.
- If they eye spends one second on each fixation, it will take 6 seconds to read the sentence.
Let’s try blocking the sentence:
#2 The bear went over the mountain.
- Now there are only two eye fixations. If the eye spends two seconds on each eye fixation then it will only take four seconds—two seconds less than the word-by-word method in the first example.
Rereading
Another obstacle to quick, high-comprehension reading is rereading. Rereading is like stuttering of the eye. When the eye constantly moves back across words already read, then continuity of the meaning is lost and comprehension lowered. Basically, this is just a bad habit and must be broken! The only way to completely erase the bad habit is by replacing it with a good habit. Blocking is a method of focusing the eye on moving forward. When the purpose of obtaining meaning is emphasized, then blocking becomes a great tool to create meaning from each block of words. Words are grouped into meaningful blocks thereby facilitating the extraction of meaning from each word.
Saying the words
The habit of saying words in your head or aloud as you read is called subvocalization. This obstacle limits even fast readers because they can only go as fast as they can "speak" the words, about 250 words per minute. This may be the hardest habit to break when speed reading.
Most people claim that subvocalization helps with their comprehension and by removing the subvocalization, their comprehension deteriorates. This may happen at first—speed typically increases and comprehension decreases as students begin blocking—but with practice, comprehension can return to the same level as before (or higher) while the speed remains faster than before students begin blocking.
It is not necessary to hear the words in your head in order to comprehend them. The eye can send the information directly to the brain which processes meaning. By removing the unnecessary step of subvocalization, then they eye can move faster, sending more information to the brain for processing in a shorter amount of time. This equals a faster reading rate.
Slow Eyes
Eyes move slowly when reading for several reasons. We already looked at two of those reasons: word-by-word reading and rereading. The eye may also move slowly because the brain is not focusing on extracting meaning from the words being read. Daydreaming and confusion are the main culprits for slow eyes. If your student zones out while reading, then their eyes may continue to move, but no comprehension is taken from the text. Once the daydream is over, the student must then reread what they didn’t process. Add that to the basic reading skill of word-by-word reading and they are likely to give up reading the text before they get very far into it.
It’s important to give the brain something to do while reading to keep it focused on the act of reading. At first, practicing blocking is a great challenge for the brain to keep it engaged. Once blocking becomes second-nature it’s necessary for the student to actively organize the meaning of what’s being read and connect it to their background information.
Review
In order to improve reading skills and develop speed reading techniques, students need to practice, practice, practice! Blocking is the key to overcoming the obstacles that have keep many readers from progressing into speed readers. Blocking helps students to read faster and to understand more of what they read.