Speed Reading

Paul Nation in his book What Should Every EFL Teacher Know suggests that every language course should consist of four strands: Vocabulary development, Extensive input and output, grammar explanation and fluency development. By giving these four strands equal amount of time in EFL lessons, students will learn the foreign language.

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In this post, I will concentrate on speed reading which belongs into the fluency development. If you cannot use the language with some degree of fluency, you cannot claim (and feel) that you know the foreign language. Moreover, fluent reading is essential for successful comprehension. And to achieve it, you need to train it.

In this post, you will find a short game for elementary students of English to measure their reading speed. In the future, I plan to publish several more speed reading texts for elementary students, and a mobile phone app.

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It is important to read quickly in a foreign language because “by reading quickly, students are training themselves to process meaning chunks. Reading quickly
encourages guessing from context and ignoring unknown words.” (Paul Nation)

To practise this skill, I prepared the following game. Click the button below and start reading as quickly as you can. When you finish, click the orange button “FINISH”, and answer the comprehension questions. Answer the questions as well as you can because your score will be reduced if you make a mistake.

Speed Reading

Read the text just once!!! If you do it twice or several times, your results will go up and they will not show your real reading speed and comprehension.

Please, share your results in the comments below. You do not have to sign your results, just write the number of words per minute, you have achieved.

I hope you find this activity interesting and useful. Please, let us know.