… a farce.
There seem to be a slew of
applications (you know them as apps) that purport to increase one’s reading
speed. Worse, there are even more blogs and articles out there eating the
concept up. Wish I could be as enamored but my years of experience as a reading
teacher struggle mightily to be as excited about these products as others seem
to be. I’m actually dubious that any of those writing about these apps have
actually used them for more than an hour or two or taken the time to reflect on
their efficacy.
I’m of the opinion that speed
reading apps, especially the older you are, are akin to buying snake oil and
hair tonic –loads of promises with nothing more like to occur than a placebo
result and a sense of being swindled.
I downloaded and tested two apps,
Fastr and ReadQuick, several months ago. (I picked these two simply because they
were free the day I discovered them.) Both programs are fundamentally the same
in their execution: you see words flashed quickly on the screen, you “read”
them, and then hope to keep up. Where they diverge is in what materials you can
use to practice your reading speed.
ReadQuick will let you read
articles from sites like The Morning News, The Feature, and Longreads, though
you’re not really limited because you can import from any site. You can set the
rate of words displayed from 100 to 800 words per minute (WPM). ReadQuick
displays one word at a time once you turned it on. The program also provides
stats for you such as the number of articles and words you’ve read in a week,
month, or year.
Fastr works more with existing
books, ones without DRM. Unlike ReadQuick, you have the options of seeing one
word at a time on the screen, or several. Fastr also predetermines, based on
book length and the rate of reading you choose using an adjustable meter, how
long it will take you to speed read the book you’ve selected.
For this blog, I’m going to stick
with my experience using Fastr as my example.
I downloaded Treasure Island as my practice book. I was shown that, set to 100-words
per minute, I would complete “reading” chapter one of Treasure Island in 24 minutes and 46 seconds. This time remains the
same whether choosing to have one word at a time presented to me or several.
Sounds okay to me, but then again so does a miracle hair tonic.
I started with method one, trying
to read one word at a time. The weakness to seeing one word at a time becomes
fabulously apparent when seeing the first sentence of the book. It follows:
Chapter 1 The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral, Benbow, Squire Trelawney, Dr.
Livesey, and the rest of the gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole
particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing
back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still
treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-, and go back
to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman
with the sabre cut first tool up his lodging under our roof.
In case you missed it, that’s a
chapter numeration, a chapter title, and the first sentence of the book. Even
with it presented before me in its entirety, it’s a daunting series of
information to retain and understand. And yet… Fastr would have you believe
that in seeing one word at a time, and with continual practice, you will eventually
be speeding through such densely written text. Pi-shaw, I say. Pi-shaw in my
language means: Yeah, you may read more quickly, but you’re grasp of what you’ve
read will be its inverse.
More amazing, or is that
ridiculous, to me is that you can ramp up the program to a reading speed of
1,600 WPM. That’s not a typo. One thousand and six hundred words per minute.
The program informs you that at this speed you will have finished chapter one
of Treasure Island in a tight 1 minute and 32 seconds! Even better, you’ll have
more hair on your head than you did when you were eighteen! (Special note: I
may have made that last part up.)
At 1,600 WPM you cannot see but a
few words between the blur of everything else claiming to be words. I tried
reading this way using the multiple words aspect and met with the same issue.
Namely, what level of Dante’s Hell does this activity take place? To be somewhat
fair, only somewhat, you’re supposed to work your way up to this level. No go
100 to 1,600 in one sitting. I’m on the verge of writing pi-shaw again.
Now, before I get assailed by the
individuals behind these apps, let me note a few things. Yes, you can increase
your rate of reading. I work with a handful of students every year specifically
in this regard. These are students reading around a rate of 60-70 WPM when I
first start with them. 60-70 WPM is generally regarded as too slow for their
age (11-12) and academic setting. With a lot of repeated and timed reading of
short passages, nearly all improve their reading rate. Most will find
themselves reading closer to 100-125 WPM after half a year of guidance. There
are of course the usual outliers.
What differentiates what I’m
doing, when compared to the hollow promises of speed reading apps, is how I
approach the task. I work with the entire text before the student, not one word
at a time, or even a few words at a time. Students need to see words in chunks
and sentences. Many troubled readers already tend focus on one word at a time,
which both slows them down and impacts their comprehension. (By the way, I
haven’t even touched this critical component yet.)
Students hear me read the passage
in question aloud. This is done to build their understanding of how to read
different types of writing, to develop their ear for reading. There is such a
thing as having an ear for reading. We teach, for example, the very young to
elevate their voices when learning to grasp how to read a question mark. The
same work goes into helping slower reading students understand how to read a
light-hearted poem versus a straightforward passage in science. You simply
don’t read them the say way or at the same rate. Faster is not going to help a
student one darn bit in an unfamiliar reading situation or when a text becomes too
complex. (Refer to the excerpt of Treasure
Island.)
Reading is not about speed, it’s
about understanding. I’ve worked with dozens and dozens of accurate,
fast-reading, student over the years who’ve not a clue as to what it all meant.
Teachers commonly refer to these types of readers as word callers. Programs
like Fastr and ReadQuick amount to the same thing. Call out words faster and
you’ll be a better reader. Nuts.
Most reading WPM charts suggest that
students top out at 199 WPM by grade 8. And, those students who are reading
aloud that quickly are in the 90th percentile as oral readers. The
50th percentile, which is where some 80% of us fall, is 150 WPM.
Silently we can and do read more quickly, but not by much. Again in grade 8,
the average rate of silent reading per minute falls somewhere around 185-205
WPM. At the college level, 250-270 WPM is regarded as an adequate average. Keep
in mind that all of these averages include a measure of understanding on the
student’s end.
The key, for this teacher of
reading, is always final understanding; and I don’t see how speed reading apps -with
their extremely narrow approaches- help in that regard. Even in my work with
helping improve a student’s rate of reading, I’m working constantly on their
flow of reading and comprehension.
In my experience, readers who
finish first in class and maintain great understanding are not the norm. I’ve
also learned, again through years of observation, that those handful of
students just happen to have spent a lot of their idle time reading, from
books, not speed-reading apps. That’s why they’re generally quicker. Lot’s of
actual reading having occurred.
Think of it this way. You want to
become a wine aficionado, which means spending a lot of time learning about
grapes, soil content and rainfall patterns, to name a few things. It also means
sampling a lot of wine. Does gulping sample after sample of wine, out of
context and as quickly as you can, make you more experienced and knowledgeable
about them? I sincerely doubt it. And yet, programs like Fastr and ReadQuick
would have you believe this.
Reading is the same way. You need
to savor at points what you’ve read, to roll the information and language
around in your mouth for a while before you pass judgments or draw conclusions
about it.
Speaking of wine…
These are the sources I used as
supporting data for this post.
