1.

Faster Effective Reading

The comprehension passage on this course are designed to help
your reading speed. A higher reading rate, with no loss of comprehension,
will help you in other subjects as well as English, and the general
principles apply to any language. Naturally, you will not read every book
at the same speed. You would expect to read a newspaper, for example,
much more rapidly than a physics or economics textbook, but you can
raise you average reading speed over the whole range of material you
wish to cover so that the percentage gain will be the same whatever kind
of reading you are concerned with.
The reading passages which follow are all of an average level of
difficulty for your stage of instruction. They are all approximately 500
word long. They are about topics of general interest which do not require
a great deal of specialized knowledge. Thus they fall between the kind of
reading you might find in your textbook and the much less demanding
kind you will find in a newspaper or light novel. If you read this kind of
English, with understanding, at say 400 words per minute, you might
skim through a newspaper at perhaps 650-700, while with a difficult
textbook you might drop to 200 or 250.
Perhaps you would like to know what reading speed are common
among native English-speaking university studens and how those speeds
can be improved. Tests in Minnesota, USA, for example, have shown that
students without special training can read English of average difficulty,
for example Tolstoy’s War and Peace in translation, at speed of between
240 and 250 w.p.m. It is further claimed that with intensive training over
seventeen weeks speed of over 1000 w.p.m, can be reached, but this
would be quite exceptional.
If you get to the point where you can read books of average
difficulty at between 400 and 500 w.p.m with 70% or more
comprehension, you will be doing quite well, though of course and
further improvement of speed with comprehension will be a good thing.
In this and the following three passages we shall be looking at
some of the obstacles to faster reading and what we can do to overcome
them.

Think of passage as a whole … (1)

When you practice reading with passages shorter than book length, like
the passages in this course, do not try to take in each word separately, one
after the other. It is much more difficult the grasp the broad theme of the
passage this way, and you will also get stuck on individual word which
may not be absolutely essential to a general understanding of the passage.
It is a good idea to skim through the passage very quickly first (say 500
word in a minute or so) to get the general idea of each paragraph. Titles,
paragraph headings and emphasized word (underlined or in italics) can be
a great help in getting this skeleton outline of the passage. It is surprising
how many people do not read titles, introductions or paragraph heading.
Can you, without looking back, remember the title of this passage and the
heading of this paragraph?
(From Practical Faster
Reading)

2. Obstacles to Faster Effective Reading

Perhaps you have seen very young children or very old people
learning to read. They move the index finger along the line of print,
pointing to each word, sometimes even to individual letters, saying the
word or letters to themselves in a low voice. This is called vocalizing …
(2). Sometimes the learner makes no sound though his lips may move to
from the word, sometimes there is not even any perceptible movement of
the mouth at all, but the learner is still activating his throat muscles
slightly to “say” the word to himself. He is still vocalizing.
However slight the extent of vocalizing may be it will still be
impossible for such a reader to reach a speed of more than about 280
w.p.m. The appreciation of written word must be entirely visual and we
must read more than one word at a time…(3).
Look at ‘you’, the second word of this passage. Even if you look
straight at the ‘o’ of that word, without moving your eyes at all you can
clearly see ‘perhaps’ and ‘have’ on either side. So you can read three
words at once. Now look at the word ‘word’ on line 3. With a very slight
movement of the eyes, you can take in the whole phrase ‘....... saying the
word or letters .......’ in the same glance. In the same way, you can
probably take in a complete short sentence on one line, like the one on
line 4, at one glance. None of the lines of print on a page this size should
need more than three eye movements. Take line 6. This would perhaps
break up into three word groups: (1) ......... times there is not even ..........
(2) .......... any perceptible movement ..............(3) ............. of the mouth at
all, but ........ When you are reading well, your eyes will be one or two
word groups ahead of the one your mind is talking in.

Practise on something easy and interesting …(4)

Many students trying to increase their effective reading speed
become discouraged when they find that if they try to race through a
passage faster, they fail to take in what they have read. At the end, they
have been so busy ‘reading faster’ that they cannot remember what the
passage was about. The problem here is that the material they are
practising on is either too difficult for then in vocabulary or content, or
not sufficiently interesting. We hope that the passages in this course
material will be both interesting and fairly easy, but you should also
practise as much as you can in your own time. Read things you like
reading. Go to the subject catalogue in the library biography, sport,
domestic science, the cinema......there is bound to be some area which
interst you and in which you can find books of about your level of ability
or just below.
If you want a quick check on how easy a book is, read through
three or four pages at random. It is there are, on average, more then five
or six words on each page that are completely new to you then the book
(though you may persevere with it for interest’s sake) is not suitable for
reading speed improvement. Incidentally, you should try to read three or
four times as much light speed reading material (whatever it is
Newsweek, The Saint or A Tale of Two Cities) as you do close, slow
textbook work. You cannot achieve a permanent improvement in your
reading speed if most of the time you are practising reading slowly.
(From Practical Faster
Reading)

3. Hints for Reading Practice

Set aside time each day …(5)

Most of us can find 15 minutes or half an hour each day for some
specific regular activity. It is be a free period or a regular wait, say in
the queue for a bus or meal, even while eating break. One famous
surgeon always made it a rule to spend at least 15 minutes on general
reading before he went to sleep each night. Whether he went to bed at
10 p.m or 2.30 a.m, made no difference. Even if you cannot keep to
this kind of discipline, it is a good idea to make sure you always a
general interest book in your pocket. Don’t forget it should be a book
which entertains you the English must not be too difficult for you.

Check your progress through pacing …(6)

Nearly all ‘speed reading’ courses have a ‘pacing’ element, some
timing device which let student know how many words a minute he is
reading. You can do this simply by looking at watch every 5 or 10
minutes and noting down the page number you have reached. Check
average number of words per page for the particular book you are
reading. How do you know when 5 minutes have passed on your
 watch if you are busy reading the book? Well, this is difficult at first.
A friend can help by timing you over a set period, or you can read
within hearing distance of a public clock which strikes the quarter
hours. Pace yourself every three or four days, always with the same
kind of easy, general interest book. You should soon notice your
habitual w.p.m rate creeping up.

Check comprehension …(7)

Obviously there is little point in increasing your w.p.m, rate if you
do not understand what you are reading. When you are consciously
trying to increase your reading speed, stop after every chapter (if you
are reading a novel) or every section or group of ten or twelve pages
(if it is a text and ask yourself a few question about what you have
been reading. If you find you have lost the thread of the story, or you
cannot remember clearly the details of what was said, re-read the
section or chapter.

‘Lightning speed’ exercise …(8)

Try this from time to time. Take four or five pages of the general
interest book you happen to be reading at the time. Read them as fast
as you possibly can. Do not bother abouth whether you understand or
not. Now go back and read them at what you feel to be your ‘normal’
w.p.m rate, the rate at which you can comfortably understand. After a
‘lightning speed’ read through (probably around 600 w.p.m) you will
usually find that your ‘normal’ speed has increased perhaps by as
much as 50-100 w.p.m. This is the technique athletes use when they
habitually run further in training than they will have to on the day of
the big race.
(From Practical Faster
Reading)

4. Hints for Reading Practice

Dictionaries slow you down …(9)

If you have chosen the right, fairly easy, sort of book for your
general reading practice, you will not need to use a dictionary for such an
exercise. If you really must know the dictionary meaning of all the words
you meet (a doubtful necessity) job them down on a piece of paper to
look up later. Actually the meanings of many words will be clear from the
sentence around them what we call the ‘context’. Here is an example. Do
you know the word ‘sou’ wester? It has two meanings in English as the
following sentence indicate.

a. In spite of the fact that the fishermen were wearing sou’ westers
the storm was so heavy they were wet through.
b. An east or north east wind brings cold, dry weather to England but
a
sou wester usually brings rain.

You should have guessed very easly that in sentence a) the word
sou’ wester refers to some kind of waterproof clothing, presumably quite
thick and heavy since it is worn by fishermen in storms. In sentence b) is
is clearly a kind of wind, coming from a south-westerly direction.
Incidentally you would have had the greatest difficulty in finding this
word in most dictionaries since it often appears a long way down among
the secondary meaning of south. If you did not know that sou’ meant ‘
south’ in the first place you could only have found the word by the merest
chance.

Pay attention to paragpaph structure …(10)

Most paragraphs have a topic sentence which expresses the central
idea. The remaining sentences expand or support that idea. It has been
estimated that between 60 and 90% of all expository, paragraphs in
English have the topic sentence first. Always pay special attention to the
first sentence of a paragraph it is most likely to give you the main idea.
Sometimes, though, the first sentence in the paragraph does not
have the feel of a main idea sentence. It does not seem to give us enough
new information to justify a paragraph. The next most likely place to look
for the topic sentence is the last sentence of the paragraph.
Take this paragraph for example : Some students prefer a strict
teacher who tells them exactly what to do. Others prefer to be left to work
on their own. Still others like a democratic discussion type of class. No
one teaching method can be devised to satisfy all student at the same
time.
Remember that the opening and closing paragraph of a passage or
chapter are particularly important. The opening paragraph suggests the
general direction and content of the piece, while the closing paragraph
often summarizes the very essence of what has been said.
(From Practical Faster
Reading)
EXERCISE 2.

Look at the clues 1 to 10 on text 1,2,3,4. These are the keys how to improve your
reading speed. No read them carefully and retell based on your understanding to the
meaning of each clue by using Indonesian language, but not translation.

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