Reading fluency plays an important part in academic achievement at colleges and universities. Speed reading courses, along with repeated reading and extensive reading, are popularly used methods to help students increase their reading speed. Several studies have shown the positive influence of a speed reading course in L2/FL on students' reading…

This study investigated the effects of a six-month course in speed reading in three areas of reading proficiency development: 1) general reading comprehension, 2) knowledge of high-frequency vocabulary, and 3) reading-rate and accuracy. The participants (N = 105) were Japanese students studying English as a foreign language in Grade 10 at a…

Fluent reading is essential for successful comprehension. One dimension of reading fluency is reading rate, or reading speed. Because of the importance of reading fluency, fluency development activities should be incorporated into classroom practice. One activity that meets the fluency development conditions proposed by Nation (2007) is speed…

Web skimming may be a kind of literacy but it's not the kind that matters most. In this article, the author contends that web skimming indicates a decline of literacy. The author discusses research conducted by Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, on how users skim web pages. He shows how the web is damaging the right way to read.

Is Skim reading effective? How do readers allocate their attention selectively? The authors report 3 experiments that use expository texts and allow readers only enough time to read half of each document. Experiment 1 found that, relative to reading half the text, skimming improved memory for important ideas from a text but did not improve memory…

Speed reading should emphasize flexibility in applying reading skills and should use methods that stress creative thinking. (CK)

Over the last 50 years, certain ideas have become dominant that make learning to read different than it once was than the ideas that children are neurologically "wired" to use language "competently" in certain ways. Noam Chomsky has promoted the idea that there are certain "syntactic structures" hard-wired in the human brain. That view, the author…

Speed reading does not permit the deliberation needed to savor and appreciate literary craftsmanship. (DD)

Some suggestions that will assist in increasing reading speed. (Author)

Points out the physiological impossibility of reading 50,000 words per minute and argues that speed reading is an inefficient, if not disastrous, technique to use in studying. Bibliography. (RW)

Describes some of the detrimental effects of speed reading. (DD)