How to Help Students Read Faster
Learning how to read faster can be an invaluable skill. Teachers can help students read faster by showing them a few simple steps. By teaching your students to learn how to read faster you can teach them to become better students. Students who read quickly with comprehension may be more confident in their learning abilities and may be able to focus on the content rather than having to worry about getting through the assignment.
Instructions
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Preview the book. Teach your students that reading the book does not necessarily picking it up, turning to page one, and reading each word of the text until you reach the back cover. Spending 5-10 minutes previewing the book to see what its main ideas are, what chapters it contains, how it is structured, and so on will prove more effective than simply reading the book or article word-for-word. Once the book has been previewed, set it down and walk away from it for a period of time to allow the information to settle in before returning to read it.
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Find a quiet place and get in position to read. In order to read quickly yet effectively, the atmosphere needs to be conducive for learning. There needs to be little possibility of interruption for about 20-30 minutes. The proper posture for reading is to be seated with feet on the floor and the book at a 45 degree angle to your line of sight. It is best to sit at the edge of a table and use the edge of the table to brace the book or another larger book to sit the smaller book on.
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Guide your eyes straight down the page. Keeping as much focus on the material as possible, simply allow the eyes to go down the middle portion of the page, not allowing the eyes to move from left to right or right to left. Do this for every page of text, taking no more than 5-6 seconds to reach the bottom of the page. Go all the way to the end of the book in about 20-30 minutes time. If it is a particularly long book, you can take 2-3 sessions to complete this step. Full comprehension is not necessary at this point. Once finished, take a break of 10-15 minutes.
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Read several words or lines of text at a time. Most people have been trained to believe that you can only read and understand one word at a time. According to some advocates of a "whole mind" system, reading can be accomplished using the non-conscious mind to comprehend large blocks of material at one time. Other systems, like Howard Stephen Berg's Mega Speed Reading system, tout the ability of the mind to understand text when read forward and backward while the eyes follow a guide (finger or pencil) quickly across the page. Try these methods and if they do not work, you can always instruct your students to move quickly from word to word as they make their way through the text.
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Stop to take frequent breaks and "map" out what you have learned. Find a natural stopping point every 20 minutes or so and quickly write down anything that you can remember from what you have read. You and your students will be pleasantly surprised by the results. This allows your mind to regurgitate the information you would have spoken or thought as you were reading. Writing this down makes it easier to quiet the mind once again and retain the material once you have read through it.
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Tips & Warnings
The key for your students is to have the mind as quiet as possible and to not say the words as they read. Speaking the words either aloud or inside the mind slows the ability of the mind to grasp and comprehend the material since it will be busy trying to enunciate each word individually. Proponents who practice this method of reading generally find that their comprehension does not significantly decrease.
