Speed Reading

Submitted by phantom

With the vast amount to information that a child need to read, they will have a competitive advantage if they are able to speed read without losing the meaning of the material.
A normal person read around 125 words per minute, a speed reader can easily read 500 – 1000 words per minute.

Reading is a process of converting words into its corresponding meaning. The problem with reading is that most of us are trained from young to read at the speed of our speech, which greatly reduce our redeading speed. Our brain can process words at a faster speed than our speech, this is where most speed reading techniques come into play.

The reading process is usually as follows:

words (visually)->words (verbally)->meaning

There are various speed reading techniques out there, I am introducing 2 in this article.

The first method is to speed up the reading process by reading at a very fast speed in the mind. This require your eye to move across the page at high speed and to read out in the mind very fast. One way to train fast eye movement is to get the child to move his eye left to right very fast in a zigzag fashion by following some zigzag line. Over time, the child will get acustom to moving their eye at faster than normal speed.

The second method is to skip the middle portion of the reading process as follows
words (visually)->meaning

By looking at the words or sentence, the meaning gets translated to the brain directly, this will greatly speed up reading by large magnitude. Chinese is a good language where this technique can be easily used, for example the word (飞机场) (airport), by looking at the 3 word, you should directly know that means airport without reading it out.

One method of training the child is to get them to read by blocks. Example, start with reading 2 word by 2 word, then increase to 3, and so on. Hopefully, the child will be able to look at the paragraph and know the meaning. One interesting youtube

Concluding this article, as parents, sometime we taught our kid the wrong method to read, it is time when we need to rethink if those techniques that we use will under develop our childs potential.