IMPROVING YOUR READING SKILLS

IMPROVING YOUR READING SKILLS

Reading is one of the important ways to study. Students can hardly go through their course of study without reading. Reading involves interpretation of written symbols, Phrases and sentences. It involves critical, creativity, imagination and problem solving.

It is clear from that the reading process involves mastering the meaning of a text as well as evaluating and reflecting on the text. Reading therefore is much mere than seeing words clearly; It is more than pronouncing words correctly and more than recognizing their meanings in isolation of other group of words i a given text. Reading requires one to think, feel and imagine, for efficient study in school student need to read fast. It is true that materials for reading are read based on the purpose and need requirement of the reader at the particular time. However, one needs to develop a faster reading skils for the following reasons.

1. If you read faster you are likely to cover much more ground in a given time. You will read many more written materials  than you have done. Increasing your reading speed will help you meet meet the demand.

2. Reading faster means reducing the time that would have being taken in doing other work. This means you will have enough time for recreational activities that would tension and increase your desire for reading and studying. It will also reduce crowding effect on your reading, which turn leads to reading in anxiety. The result in inefficient reading.

3. You understand better if you read faster. Some people wrongly believe that understanding is better achieved by slowly picking words, and reading and re-reading sentences but this is not true one who reads words by words has the tendency of trying to achieve the meaning of the individual words before arriving at the meaning of a sentence or discourse. This is wrong because the meaning of a particular word might be different from the meaning of the same word read together in a sentence. Efficient reading and studying entails eye-fixation or eye-span on phrases and not on words.

The optimum reading speed of an efficient reading or student is 600 words per minutes. In other words, a very highly skilled and efficient reader reads ten words per second. If your reading speed is a mere 125-150 words per minutes, it means you have reading problem or fault that need to be avoided For effective reading; this faults includes,Head movement, Pointing to words, Regression, Poor eye fixation, Vocalization, Sub-Vocalization.