Speed Reading

With the development of economy and society, English assumes an ever increasing importance in China. It poses a great challenge to make good use of the vast sea of materials written and published in English. However, the English proficiency of Chinese college students is far from satisfactory, even that of English majors. Or to put it in another way, the teaching of English in Chinese colleges is not very effective and efficient. How to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of English teaching in colleges so as to prepare students to cope with the challenge in society is an important issue. Speed reading could offer some help.In China where English is a foreign language, there are not many opportunities to practice English in natural communication. Thus, reading, especially speed reading, becomes a very good way of practice and input. Important as speed reading is in China's EFL teaching and learning, the issue has not been attached enough importance in the current English teaching context in China. For a long time, speed reading has been just briefly mentioned in the extensive reading class, which is still a far cry from speed reading. One of the reasons for the backwardness of speed reading in English in China is the lack of an effective and feasible method.To answer the need of current EFL teaching, the author proposed a new way to teach speed reading in the classroom in colleges out of her own teaching practice. The new method is based on theories on reading and speed reading, esp. psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic theories. An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of the new method on reading speed and English language proficiency.Sixty third-year undergraduates of English majors from Shandong University of Technology participated in the experiment to explore the impact of the 12. week's training on reading. The results showed that (1) the training does have contributed to the improvement of students' speed reading ability. The reading speed is significantly...