Speed Reading: Optimizing Reading Input

Agadir - We may agree that people nowadays don’t read much. At schools and colleges teachers and professors complain that their students don’t read enough.

What is a possible way to make students read, make improvements in their reading skills and at the same time grow more knowledgeable?

I think that Speed reading/Enriched Reading may prove to be such a way. What is Speed reading/Enriched Reading then?

It’s a way to optimize our reading capacity and make the reading itself more beneficial. But before indulging in a detailed description, it is very important to mention that readers use very different techniques to achieve their reading. And because of the strategies they use, some of them succeed in understanding the message while others go half way in understanding and still others read but completely miss the point .The amount and the quality of reading done by a student determines his academic success or failure.

The choice of Enriched Reading ( which is a type of silent reading ) as a topic for this presentation was done on the basis that silent reading is more required at university level than reading aloud. It is also more economical because it is time saving since the pace of silent reading outpaces that of reading aloud. For reading in general is done first, then uttering comes next. Only first grade pupils do the reading and uttering at the same time and that’s because they do their reading letter by letter.

 Silent reading then is more economical. To make it more practical, I think we should examine what Enriched Reading suggests.

The first step will be ridding ourselves of bad reading habits. These can be listed as follows:

1-Some people read word by word. And this results in a poor reading pace and often a failure to understand what is intended or meant to be understood.

 2-Some readers use a pen or the index finger to read. Such readers have actually to point at something before reading it, which results in pretty much the same as was mentioned above.

3-Another bad habit is moving the lips while reading silently. Result: slow pace too.

4-Head movements back and forth are the last and worst habit.

What should a good potential silent reader do then?

He should get rid of the bad habits mentioned above and the rules to apply will be very simple but to the point.

- No reading word by word.

- No use of the index finger or a pen to read.

- No movements of the lips while reading silently.

- No head movements back and forth when reading.

Once bad reading habits are eliminated, what next?

It logically follows that some good reading habits should take their place and these are described below.

- Good readers are aware that reading is mainly done by the eyes .so; trained eyes constitute a crucial asset in the activity of reading .A good reader reads whole sentences rather than just words or chunks of words at a time.

Pauses at the end of sentences which are observed while reading aloud are shortened to allow reading to flow on and on. When at the end of a line a sentence is not yet finished ,the good reader gets ready to shift his eyes to the next line immediately after taking notice of the last three or four words. People who are not aware that reading is mainly done by the eyes tend to move their heads as if they are watching a miniature tennis play. This is a bit exaggerated yet it happens.

- As the eyes get more and more trained, so must the mind .The reader should feel comfortable with his newly acquired pace of reading. That is, one should still understand, process and store (if necessary) what he has read.

- The mind is a tool that gets sharper with constant use. So, in order to optimize his reading, one should time himself to see if he has made it any better. The mind is involved in this activity because its processing capacity is challenged by the new reading pace it is exposed to.

TIMING PROCEDURE:

At the end of each reading session, let's make it one hour, the person doing the reading should stop and count the number of words in a given line (articles also count as words) and multiply it by the number of lines he has covered. Once this is done, it will give him approximately the number of words he has read in one hour because not all the lines have the same number of words. The sum total of words should then be divided by 60 to give the reading pace per minute. The total per minute divided by 60 will give the number of words covered per second. A serious reader is one who shoots every time for more improvement of his score.

What does the final step of enriched reading look like?

4- If a person is reading for fun, he is not required to go any further once he closes his book. But in training, such as the one mentioned above, the next step is to sum up what has been read. Writing conventions should be observed in summary writing to allow possible assessment. A summary can also be very helpful much later .It will serve to remind the reader of certain important facts or events that should be remembered or taken into account before one goes any further. This is in case Enriched Reading is scheduled once or twice a week.

 GOOD HABITS SUMMED UP:

 1-Trained eyes read whole sentences .Trained eyes see what should be seen.

 2-Reading should be timed to allow subsequent improvement.

3-The mind’s ability to process and store new information should be expanded through constant and deliberate effort to follow the growth of the acquired reading pace.

4-A summary of what has been read should be written at the end of each reading session.

 5-A good summary can serve as a spring-board to subsequent reading.

A FINAL WORD:

If we ask anybody to do something, chances are that he may do it either well or badly. But if we teach him HOW to do it, then he is more likely to perform it well. I think it’s time to think seriously about introducing this procedure into our secondary education syllabus or at least into the syllabus of preformation classes as a first step. This, I think is one way of bridging the gap between secondary and tertiary levels in the Moroccan educational system.

For this purpose, I invite you to think about possible ways of successfully implementing Enriched Reading at both secondary and tertiary levels.