Typical of our group, Eric keeps coming up with new ways to do things. Everything he does is heavily based in research. The article below expands somewhat on the speed reading thread we’ve been touching on here recently. A bit lengthy but a very important read, in my view, and a chance to study Eric’s overall program. I also made a new category for it:
Hey Ben –
Last summer (2014), when I was reading works by vocabulary acquisition researcher Paul Nation I came across the speed reading activity. I thought it fit exceptionally well with the Teaching with Comprehensible Input (TCI) approach and any classroom focused on building fluency.
Reading fluency is about reading as fast as possible to obtain a general understanding. The upper limit for speed is 250-300 words-per-minute (any faster and kids are skipping over words) and we want 70-80% scores on a comprehension quiz.
In speed reading, a student is timed as he/she reads, then without looking back at the text, takes a quiz of the main ideas. The student uses an answer key to score his/her own quiz. The speed can be graphed and the comprehension score recorded. Once a routine is established, the entire activity is completed in under 10 minutes. Think of this as simply the reading version of a speed write.
Research shows that L2/FL students have low reading rates and that a speed reading program can double their reading speed, while maintaining and increasing reading comprehension. A speed reading course also supports a host of affective variables all related to success, i.e. confidence, enjoyment, and motivation. A speed reading course can prepare and empower students to read independently. While speed is the primary goal, the activity provides more comprehensible input and can thus further acquisition. The message speed reading gives to the students is to read something easy, read for meaning, read fast, and read a lot, meeting the four elements of a fluency development program (Nation, 2005). Building reading fluency is the start of a virtuous cycle: reading faster means more can be read, which leads to understanding more, and that can cause reading to be more enjoyable (Nuttall, 1996).
Since fluency requires automatic (unconscious) use of language, then a test of fluency is a test of unconscious knowledge. We call that unconscious knowledge “acquired competence” and I call a test of it an “Acquired Competence Evaluation (ACE).” The speed reading ACE is practical. It is quick and easy to score. This evaluation format would also have a positive backwash effect on instruction and preparation. It encourages doing more comprehensible reading and focusing more on fluency development. And the ACE is input-based, so the test is not time away from acquisition.
The texts in a speed reading course can be used for building reading fluency and assessing acquired competence, but we can easily think of other uses for these high-frequency texts. Think of them simply as 1-page graded readers. They can be used for shared class reading, independent reading, dictation, read-aloud, etc.
Last year I realized there were only a few speed reading course books for ESL/EFL and I was unaware of any such books in other languages. The easiest of these courses require a vocabulary of 500 words, although more beginning students should also engage in speed reading. So I wrote a program. My Spanish course is Speed Readings for Spanish Learners and has thirty 400 word stories and comprehension quizzes written within the highest frequency 300 words. The readings parallel the readings from the student book “Spanish New Mini-stories for Look, I Can Talk!” (LICT). The speed reading course is for any language learner either following LICT or any learner who already has a vocabulary of the highest frequency 300 words, e.g. level 2-4 high school students.
There is more info (including a 15 minute video that explains it all) on the Spanish course here: http://acquisitionclassroom.weebly.com/store/c1/Featured_Products.html