So I got hold of a demo copy of The Reader’s Edge, a piece of software discussed in my blog yesterday. The software is designed to take any reader from the reading age of around five, and give him or her tools and exercises to gradually increase reading speed.
Much like a personal trainer, the software first encourages you to benchmark your reading speed and comprehension levels, so there’s no point in trying to fool yourself, as reading too fast will result in a low comprehension, and the programme tells you that you are skim reading, as your comprehension level is too low to suggest that you are reading every word.
The software then allows you to set your target reading speed (say 100wpm above your baselined), and then it offers a number of exercises to improve your reading skills. An example exercise is horizontal span, where you are given an arrangement of words and phrases, and then have to pick the correct one from 4 offered. Sounds easy, but when you set the speed to 100wpm above your baseline, you will quickly find it quite tiring and requiring concentration. In other words, the software is genuinely working your brain.
As you progress through the exercises you get to flex your muscles in reading across and down the page, reading with a “pacer”, and push-down and push up exercises, demonstrating the increased reading speed with familiarity.
The system comes with plenty of texts to read, grouped in to subjects, so that you can read passages on subjects that interest you, and at various reading levels. The Flesch-Kincaid level is used to indicate the readability of passages so that you can see your performance on simple and complicated texts. In addition, you can import your own texts - you don’t get to test your comprehension on these, but it means that you can improve your reading speed on documents that you mean to read anyway. I imported a chapter from Adam Eason’s “Happy Brain Manual” (available for free when you sign up to Adam Up Live) in a couple of minutes by pasting it from pdf to text file. You can also import html files and rich text. This means that you won’t get bored of the same old texts, you can keep importing interesting and more challenging work as you progress.
In addition, the system runs using Microsoft’s assistant - the little fella, be it robot or wizard or genie, who introduces the exercise, analyses your performance data to date and makes recommendations on how you should configure the exercise. When you score highly, you make him very happy; he congratulates you and makes recommendations for what you should do next. The system also records the amount of time that you are active on the exercises, so you can chart your performance. All of this is wrapped up with an impressive array of report templates and charting tools to watch your reading speed grow.
The crux of the concept from which all of these exercises hang is the aim to train a reader to be “fluent”. The characteristics of a fluent reader include:
1. Have automatic decoding skills. (Words are decoded by patterns and chunks.)
2. Not vocalise words (lip or subliminally) as they are read. (The brain can process words at thousands of words per minute (WPM). Eliminating vocalisation frees the brain from being slowed down to the speaking rate. The average speaking rate for a child is 125 to 190 WPM. An adult averages between 160 to 220 WPM.)
3. See, process, and read two, three, four and more words with each eye fixation.
4. Have a very large vocabulary of sight words.
The one that interests me most is the absence of subvocalisation. Subvocalization is the tendency to pronounce words to yourself as you read. The process of subvocalization (lip or subliminally) immediately activates the part of the brain that is related to the function of pronunciation. This imposes a reading speed limit of 160 - 220 words per minute (WPM), the rate at which the average adult speaks. Subvocalization is one of the common causes that contribute to a “limited” speed-reading rate. The best way to prevent this is to develop a wider eye span. Not faced with this sound barrier and without special training deaf people often read above 1000 WPM. I certainly vocalise all words with my “inner voice”, which is a little strange given that when I type and speak either English or French (accepting that my French is rusty, but still I don’t internally translate), I do not sub-vocalise. Yet I read more than I type, and I am fairly certain that I read more than I speak. So perhaps it is just that I’ve never learnt to or needed to eliminate sub-vocalisation when I read…?
So, the big question is, is the software usable and can I see it having any effect over time? The application itself is well laid out and easy to navigate. The help section is surprisingly helpful and worth using regularly to help explain the “why” behind each of the tests, as well as explaining the objectives of the program. The marketing blurb suggests that using this every other day for 15 minutes will improve your reading speed by 100wpm in a fortnight.
Given the relative ease of use, the built-in coach and the ability to import new text, I can see this definitely improving reading speed for anyone, simply because all of the hassle is taken out of it - you don’t need to time yourself or keep a log, you won’t get bored of the texts or overly familiar with them, so this program should last you as long as you want to improve your reading speed.
In summary, this is as close to a personal trainer for your reading muscles as I can imagine you can get. Of course I’ve only had a day to play with it, however it doesn’t take long to get the hang of the software and realise that regular use of it can easily improve your reading speed.
So how did I measure up? In my first couple of dry runs I scored around 400wpm with a 50% comprehension. Pretty lousy but expected because I know that I skim read. So I settled down and read it properly and scored 303wpm with 95% comprehension. So I’m using that as my baseline. I’ve set my target to 400wpm and the exercises are challenging. Learning to open up your visual focus to recognise multiple words is hard work, and will be of benefit for speed and photoreaders alike (superreading, part of the photoreading activation process, requires this skill), so I will continue to work on this whilst I await my photoreading home study course.
Before this paragraph there were 1134 words so time yourself and I’ll test your comprehension! You can download a demo of Reader’s Edge from http://www.download.com/.
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