To teach speed reading is a very difficult proposition – trust me, I’m a teacher, and I work with many students in a small-group test preparation class where this is one of the major skills I try to teach for the reading and English sections of the ACT or SAT tests. Read our LSAT test preparation mini-site for more.
Teach Speed Reading – Pitfalls
What makes it difficult to teach speed reading is that many students will pretend to get it in an attempt to make you happy, or pretend to get it so that they aren’t behind schedule. Alternatively, they may assume that it is the pace of the reading that is important, and not the understanding of the material. This last pitfall is very dangerous, and needs to be avoided at all costs.
In order to avoid this, you must make it clear to the students you are teaching that when you teach speed reading, the comprehension level must at least stay the same for reading long passages, and that there are many types of writing, and many different kinds of subject matter, where speed reading is not helpful for you. During the teaching of speed reading, provide passages for students which are generally below their skill level to get them used to the types of passages that they know they can speed read, and then follow those up with something that would be a stretch for them to read and understand. This will very quickly teach them the difference between passages that can be speed read, and those which they need to pay minute attention to details.
Teach Speed Reading – Subvocalization
Another important tip to teach them is to eliminate subvocalization as much as possible. During grammar school, students are often relying on this technique over-much, and are not able, as a result, to read quickly. To eliminate this bad habit, practice using “sight words” every day. A “sight word” is any word that you can look at without needing to think about it at all. Sometimes, lower-level students are taught sight words that include only words whose phonetic pronunciation doesn’t match the letters in the word (like “sigh”, “though”, and “therefore”). Upper level students should be able to quickly identify all kinds of transition words, long and short, as well as a lot of larger pieces of common vocabulary. There are many resources for flash cards of sight words online, we particularly like this set, which is a good mid-level set of flash cards. Remember, accuracy is important with these words, and so is speed of recognition. The faster the students identify sight words, the better off they will be.
For older students, concepts like finding the main idea, understanding details specifically, and thinking ahead of the text are all very important. For these students, sight words and other practice activities may be too basic, and the real speed of reading comes from understanding when an example is going to be presented, how much text the example takes place, and understanding whether or not they need to bother themselves in reading these examples. In this case, it might not be as much about learning to read faster as it is about learning to read smart.
If you have other suggestions, please comment and let me know what you’ve come up with. The more strategies to teach speed reading we have, the better off we will all be as educators.