Increasing Our Reading Speed

Increasing Our Reading Speed

Introduction: Learning to read a foreign language is hard but it is even harder to learn to read a foreign language QUICKLY! In order to improve your reading speed, you need to practice reading with the intention of improving your speed. The problem is finding the right text for your speed reading practice. If your goal is to improve your reading speed, you should already know ALL of the words in the text (or at least 99% of them). Here you have a list of texts that were specially written for speed reading practice. They are all exactly the same length. That means you can read through them all, time yourself, and see if you are improving. 

General Tips: When working on your reading speed you need to take the following considerations.

• Find a balance: Read as quickly as you can while still understanding what you read. 
• Read all the way through: Do not stop, sit and think, or go back and reread anything. If you encounter a word you don't understand, just keep going. 
• Time yourself: Use your phone to record the time that it takes you to read the text and complete the questions.
• Keep a record: Write the time down each time you complete a new text in order to see if you are improving or not. 
• Focus on improvement: Actively try to read the next text even faster. Push yourself out of your comfort zone. 

Your Task: For the rest of this course, you will work on speed reading a little bit each week. Through systematic practice you can improve your speed! So, how does this work? 

• Open one of the links.
• Start your timer.
• Read the entire text without stopping as quickly as possible. 
• Answer all of the questions you can based on your memory.
• If there are any questions you can't answer, go back and find the info in the text.
• Submit your answers and stop your timer.
• Check your answers.
• Write your time and number correct in the table in your Learning Journal.
• Your goal should be to read as fast as possible and still get 70% of the questions correct.
• If you are get fewer than 70% correct, you are reading too quickly.
• If you get 100% correct, you are probably reading too slowly.
• Open another link and try again!

Collection 1: Texts written with the 1,000 most common words in English.

• Text 1 - Life in the Pacific Islands: CLICK HERE
• Text 2 - Jainism: CLICK HERE
• Text 3 - Fa Hien: CLICK HERE
• Text 4 - Willem Iskandar: CLICK HERE
• Text 5 - The Inuit: CLICK HERE
• Text 6 - Asoka: CLICK HERE

Collection 2: Texts written with the 2,000 most common words in English.

• Text 7 - Africa Facts and Figures: CLICK HERE
• Text 8 - It's Not a Bus, It's a Truck: CLICK HERE
• Text 9 - Ugali: CLICK HERE
• Text 10 - The Big Five: CLICK HERE
• Text 11 - Maarifa: CLICK HERE
• Text 12 - Pumbaas: CLICK HERE

Collection 3: Texts written with the 3,000 most common words in English.

• Text 13 - The Common Cold: CLICK HERE
• Text 14 - Relationships: CLICK HERE
• Text 15 - Chillies: CLICK HERE
• Text 16 - Batik: CLICK HERE
• Text 17 - Spam: CLICK HERE
• Text 18 - SAD: CLICK HERE

Collection 4: Texts written with the 4,000 most common words in English.

• Text 19 - Sugar: CLICK HERE
• Text 20 - Kimchi: CLICK HERE
• Text 21 - Sign Language: CLICK HERE
• Text 22 - MSG: CLICK HERE
• Text 23 - Dates: CLICK HERE
• Text 24 - Netsuke: CLICK HERE