Reading Faster

Aim:

To help students with overall timing of the paper

Target Audience:

Students

Relevance to ICFE:

Whole paper

Organisation:

pairs / individual

Materials needed:

Sample task, sample task answers; worksheet, answers, record chart
  1. Survey your students to find out how they feel about the speed at which they read. Ask them if they have an idea as to how fast to read in terms of words per minute. If you like, point out that 250-300 words per minute is considered a good reading speed for an educated reader, reading in their own language and reading a text which is non-specialist in nature. Point out that reading must be with a sufficient level of comprehension and that it is counter-productive to simply read faster and faster if understanding is being lost.

  2. Hand out the worksheet. This contains tips for improving reading speed. Ask your students to match the two halves from the two columns. (You could make this up into a set of cards that they could physically match.) When students have correctly matched the sentences, ask the students to discuss the ideas. Which do they think they would like to experiment with? Which seem impracticable?

  3. Hand out the sample text and ask the students to read through the questions only. Discuss the questions/sentence stems in class to ensure that all the students are fully familiar with the comprehension task before reading the text. Ask all the students to read the text as quickly as possible, bearing in mind that they have to answer the questions at the end. Each student should time themselves doing this. When they have finished they should note the time it took and then tackle the questions.

  4. Feedback with the answers to the text.

  5. The students should record their reading speed on their Record Chart. This text has approximately 650 words. They should then be encouraged, over a period of time, to experiment with the ideas from the matching activity. After a week or two, give them another, similar, reading text and ask them to measure their reading speed again. If there has been no improvement, ask them to reflect on the ideas they have chosen to experiment with. Should they try others? Did they make enough effort? Most students, however, should find that their reading speed has increased.

  6. Repeat the speed recording over time. Students should be motivated by an upward moving graph which shows that they are reading faster. It is important to note that this activity works well with multiple-choice and multiple matching task types but less well with gapped texts, because of the need to constantly refer back to text structure.