Speed

It’s not How Fast You Read That Matters, It’s How Well You Read

The way most kids read, you’d think it was a race. Competitive by nature, kids are constantly comparing themselves to each other, and to us, in this regard. In the beginning, reading is slow and laborious. Who wouldn’t want to read faster? But as our skills develop, and we begin to read more fluently, the desire to speed up seems only to increase. As a result, many kids—and many adults, too—read faster than they can accurately decode and comprehend.

The most common advice I give to readers is the simplest: Slow down! As simple as it is, it’s hard advice to take. So I repeat it often and always in an encouraging tone. “Give that part another try and slow down a little,” I often say. “Give your brain a chance to get the words. It’s not how fast you read that matters. It’s how well you read.”

When I’m working one-on-one with readers, I almost always start by helping them find the right reading speed. And that speed is almost always slower than the speed at which they read normally. Not surprisingly, slowing down helps kids decode more accurately. It also improves fluency and comprehension. Slowing down is also the easiest way to help kids break two bad habits: the herky-jerky stopping and starting that comes from stumbling over words, and the tendency to glide past words—or even entire sentences—they may not understand.

As I work with readers throughout the year, I want them to learn the following things about speed:

• Read at your normal talking speed. Reading is like a conversation. The text talks and we listen. Since the voice we hear is our own, it makes sense to read at our normal talking speed. Most people read faster than this. And there are many situations where that’s appropriate. But to improve our reading, we want to practice at rates that support our accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. For most of us, this is the speed at which we speak.

• Reading too fast increases mistakes. This should be obvious but it isn’t. For many kids, reading feels slow because they don’t like to read and because it takes them a long time to make their way down a page. In reality, most are reading too quickly, rushing through the easy words and crashing to a stop on the hard ones. The rushing causes them to make more mistakes which causes them to have to stop more frequently which causes their overall reading rate to decline. They notice they’re not getting very far and want to speed up even more. When we combine this cycle with material that gets a little harder every year as kids get older, we sometimes discover kids in middle and high school whose reading abilities may have actually declined since their elementary years. Slowing them down to a speed where they can read accurately and fluently is the best way to make sure this doesn’t happen.

• Reading too slow makes ideas hard to follow. While reading too quickly is the more serious problem, it’s certainly possible to read too slowly. How slow is too slow? Take out your watch and try reading one word every second. You’ll... notice... that... it... takes... so... long... to get to the end of a sentence that you may have forgotten the beginning. That’s 60 words per minute, and that’s way too slow. Now try reading two words per second (it’s a little harder). That’s 120 words per minute. It’s still slower than you’re used to, but at least it’s possible to keep track of what you’re reading. When we read aloud, or at our normal talking speed, most of us probably end up reading between 140 and 180 words per minute. Our comprehension holds up well even at rates as slow as 120 words per minute. But if we slip below 100 words per minute, our comprehension—as well as our attention—breaks down.

• Speed up within phrases; slow down between phrases. When we’re reading well, we break sentences into smaller groups of words called phrases. Within each phrase, we run our words together quickly.  Between phrases, we take just a little extra bit of time, sometimes stretching out the end of a word, sometimes actually putting in a tiny pause. This small separation helps us understand the phrase we’ve just read and gets us ready to read the next one. One of the easiest ways to improve our reading is to lengthen that space and stretch out the time between phrases. Doing this helps us speed up within phrases so we maintain an effective overall reading rate.

• Read a little faster when the text is easy, a little slower when the text is hard. While there’s always an optimal reading rate for every reader and every text, we shouldn’t read at the same rate all the time. When we encounter challenging text, slowing down may be the easiest and best thing to do. But when we hit an easy part, as we often do in fiction when we read large sections of dialog, it makes sense, and feels natural, to read a little faster.

• Slow and steady makes the grade. If I want kids to become the best readers they can be, I have to help them practice their best reading. More often than not, this means reading a little slower than they’re used to and keeping their rate fairly steady over long periods of time. This helps kids build stamina for the long reading sessions we’ll have in class and the increased reading load they’ll have to manage as they go farther in school.

Comprehension begins with words rushing into our brain. And the speed of that stream determines the time we have to turn those words into meaningful ideas. If the stream isn’t flowing just right, we may not read words accurately or understand them thoroughly even if we do.

Once we understand that the best speed for fluency and understanding is similar to our normal talking speed, we simply ask ourselves, “Am I reading like I talk?” Reading silently, we know we can go a bit faster than this. If we catch ourselves going too fast, we slow down. Eventually, we develop a habit of reading at the right rate.

Comments

[Steve Peha]

Kids hate to slow down for anything and reading is no exception. But I see such terrific improvement in kids fluency and comprehension when they lower their reading speed. Other than telling them to slow down, what's the best way to make that happen?

When reading aloud, I really do want to hear them read about as fast as they talk. They can speed up a bit when they read silently, but not too much. Ideally, I'd love to hear most kids reading about 135-165 words per minute aloud and maybe 180-220 words per minute silently. The ideal rate differs slightly for each kid and each text. But those ranges seem pretty good to me.

Now, if kids are not yet fluent chapter book readers, their rates will be much slower. But the texts they're reading are much lower. They have smaller words and shorter sentences. So someone reading 75-100 words per minute in a 2nd or 3rd grade-level text can do just fine.