Your experience

1. Your experience ‘I read aloud the words whenever I read.’ ‘If I don’t understand something, I’ll read that part again until I understand.’ If you also have the above reading habits, you may need to learn how to improve your reading speed by going through this tutorial.

2. What you’ll learn • In this tutorial, you will learn how to read faster. You will also find some exercises that aim at widening your eye-span (the number of words you can read at a glance).

3. Increasing speed of reading • Almost anyone can double his speed of reading while maintaining the same level of or even better comprehension. You can increase your reading speed if you: • Eliminate the habit of reading aloud • Avoid regressing (rereading). • Develop a wider eye-span

4. Stop reading words out • Your mind works a lot faster than your vocal organs and reading out the words means that you are forcing yourself to go through and thus understand the passage at a lower speed. If you have the habit of reading aloud when reading, practice silent reading from now on.

5. Avoid regression • In a broad sense, reading is a guessing game. Very often, you do not understand what a sentence or part of a sentence is about until you go further down the passage. Some people reread the part they don’t understand immediately only to find that they still don’t get the meaning even after rereading it a number of times. In fact, that may not be necessary because what is needed is to carry on reading and the “mystery” may be solved when more context is disclosed.Sometimes, people may even find that the problem part does not greatly interfere with the understanding of the more important ideas of the passage. So, the advice is to keep regression to the minimum.

6. Widen eye-span • Good readers do not read one word at a time. They can manage to read a few words (5-6) and this is their eye-span. Good readers are able to land their eyes on a spot on a line and tell a few words to the left and to the right of the spot. Then their eyes land on another 5 to 6 words on the line. To read a line, good readers may need to locate their eyes on 2 to 3 locations on the line while poor readers, with shorter eye-span, need to look at nearly every word on the line. Eye movement takes time and so the ability to take in more words at a glance helps increase reading speed.

7. Summary • You have learnt three ways to improve your speed of reading. In particular, you have tried some exercises designed to help you improve your reading speed.