Unfortunately students don’t like reading. And what is even worse, they hate re-reading. It is next to impossible to make them re-read an article . They will complain, they will pretend or they will go to the toilet, but the majority won’t read the text again.
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Recently I published a post on Speed Reading. The post contains a game which you can play on your computer. However, most of my students have a smart phone but no internet connection. Therefore, it is much more effective to make a mobile phone app. Students just download it and use it all the time.
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That is why I tested the speed reading game and published it as a mobile phone app. The application is free and there are no adverts inside. You can download it here .
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Speed Reading App – Instructions
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Click the Play button and choose the level you want to read. Click the level and then click Play button again. You will see a text.
Read the text as quickly as possible and then click the FINISH button.
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Read the statements (you do not have to hurry now), and decide whether the statements are true or false.
Your score is the number of words you can read per minute. Be careful, the speed goes down if you make mistakes in the comprehension questions.
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Speed Reading App – Reset
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If you want to reset the levels, it is enough to click the Setting Button at the top of the screen.
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Then click the Lock on the right side of the screen. By clicking the icon you can start from Level 1 and all your scores and Trophies will be set to 0.
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Speed reading activities are very important for learners of English. By trying to read quickly, they develop their comprehension and fluency in reading in a foreign language. Thus they improve their knowledge of English.
The problem with speed reading activities is, that they are not for elementary students of English. The texts mostly aim at advanced or intermediate students. To fill this gap, I created a speed reading application and filled it with texts for elementary learners of English.
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Speed reading – application
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Here is the speed reading application. Choose a level and read the text as quickly as possible. When you finish, click the FINISH button and then decide whether the statements are TRUE or FALSE. The final score is your speed. The speed is given in number of words per minute. Thus if you see SCORE 215, it means that your read 215 words per minute.
You can play the game on the full screen here:
[su_button url=”https://engames.eu/Speed reading elementary/index.html” target=”blank” background=”#f56b68″ size=”6″]Speed reading for elementary students[/su_button]
This is the beta version of the speed reading application. If you spot a mistake or it works badly, please leave a comment and inform us. Your comments are very important, because I would like to publish this for mobile phones and it is nearly impossible to correct the bugs then.
I hope you will find this application useful.
Share your results in the comments, so you can compare with other students of English. If you get over 200 it is very good and you will get three stars.
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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Speed Reading
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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.
[su_button url=”https://engames.eu/Speed reading fin/index.html” target=”blank” background=”#f56b68″ size=”6″]Speed Reading[/su_button]
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.