Considering a Speed Reading Course

Speed reading as a concept has been **totally disproven**. There is an excellent article “How Fast are the World’s Best Readers”, (Or perhaps it’s “How Good …” I am going by memory and my computer files were wiped). It was published in a scholarly journal in the early to mid 1980’s, study done by reputable scientific investigators. I looked this article up on ERIC and you can order a reprint for around ten or fifteen dollars; it is definitely worth it, especially if it saves you all the money on a course that is based on false premises.

Speed readers don’t read any faster than any other well-taught readers. They do not comprehend any more than other readers; in fact often less. (See above article for details and proofs.) What they actually do is to *skim*. Well, skimming is occasionally a useful tool, but (a) do you think your child reads accurately enough basically that you want to teach him to skip over things? (b) do you want skimming to be his main study method? (c) do you think it’s worth the cost of this course to teach him to skim?

Far better would be to find a tutor who is well-informed about the phonetic and linguistic structures of written English and who will work with him developing accurate in-depth reading (and writing).

Reminds me of Woody Allen’s joke. “I took one of those speed reading courses and read ‘War and Peace’ in an hour. It was about Russia.”
:-)

—des

Instead of a speed reading course, I would recommend the following during the summer:

VisionBuilder CD for 15 minutes a day to work on tracking speed,

Rewards and/or Rewards Plus from Sopris West to work on decoding skills and reading fluency,

WordSmart CD’s to improve vocabulary.

If the cost of the speed reading course is in the PACE neighborhood, I’d do PACE because of the way it develops multiple processing skills that relate to reading and other academic work. It includes exercises that improve visual processing speed.

Nancy

BTW, aside from my joke, here are some other comments.

>comprehension. In addition, the course is supposed to show students the best way to improve their vocabulary, study textbooks, take notes, and prepare for tests.

This kind of course, to improve study skills has merit. He could do this kind of course, not with speed reading.

>ime, or if he can benefit from it. At this point, he is reading on grade level. He has a lot of textbook reading assignments and his reading comprehension for these assignments is fairly low because he gets bored with the reading and rushes through it.

Learning how to find relevant points and read study the stuff is valuable. If he is bored, well welcome to high school and college. Stuff is boring sometimes. Maybe you should give the sometimes stuff is boring sometimes speech. :-)

>The course director told me my son would benefit from a speed reading course because if he read faster, he wouldn’t get bored so quickly from reading. By iicking up his reading speed dry, my son would find reading assignments more interesting and, in the process, help improve his reading comprehension. Also, the director said that the study skills

That all is quite dubious, but maybeif he reads faster then he will understand LESS and that wouldn’t be so boring. Like Virginia said it won’t help comprehension in fact it will hurt it. I am a normal/good reader (except for questionablel comprehension) and whenever they tried to speed up my reading (I didn’t exactly try to take one of these but it was all the rage back when and they actually had me read off tachistoscopes where my reading comprehension really plummeted.) it would ruin my comprehension. I can’t say ti was more interesting. It also focused me on reading faster rather than what I was reading (and I do have comprehension problems anyway).

>section of the course would be beneficial. This all made sense to me, but then again, the Director is also trying to sell fill the course and make money, so I’m not sure if he would be totally objective.

Yes he is. And it doesn’t make much sense to me. It SOUNDS logical, except that reading that fast isn’t normal.

>this reason, I’m not expecting maximum success, but think my son still may benefit from the course.

Save your money.

>Does anyone have children who have taken speed reading courses? If so, did the course help improve their reading comprehension?

I agree with Nancy that some general work on vocabulary building might be helpful. I also think he would benefit from work on study skills sans the speed reading element.

Thanks!

LJ[/quote]

—des

My child took reading lessons at Sylvan Learning Center when they suggested speed reading. What a disaster! Reading comprehension went to almost zero. My husband (also a dyslexic) had a similar experience. I would say a big NO and consider books on tape or a “talking computer program” or something similar. The boredom may be fatigue from the concentration needed. :?: