good silent reading rate for L2

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Montmorency
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Re: good silent reading rate for L2

Postby Montmorency » Mon Jun 06, 2016 12:20 am

Serpent wrote:About speedreading, I've been meaning to start a separate thread. See these articles. That was quite a relief for me.

I might be a good learner but I'm a slow reader. I've learned to accept that. Maybe part of it is how the enjoyment of reading works for me - I'm not visual at all and don't play any "movie" in my head or anything, I enjoy the flow of words. Awareness already helps, though. For example, I think I must've picked up the idea that reading a book means reading every sentence in the book smoothly. So whenever I stumble, I then slow down further to reread the sentence from the beginning to the end. This is good when you want to feel the style, but I don't always enjoy it. And in L2 I generally try to pronounce everything correctly in my mind, though recently I've allowed myself some slack with numbers.

Similarly, I've noticed that once I've looked up one word during a reading session, I'm much more likely to look up more, to the point of questioning my knowledge of fairly easy words. And again, simply being aware of the tendency already helps :)



Thanks for the link to the article. A relief to me also. :) Not that there is anything wrong with skim-reading (aka "reading for gist"), in its place. This is a specific study-skill taught to, or at least encouraged among, students, and it is of course one way we can assess the readability of an L2 book (or any book). I imagine that when President Kennedy skim-read the New York Times, that was perfectly adequate for his needs at the time. (He was possibly only scanning it for mentions of his name :-) ). But it's only one of several modes of reading, and is certainly not what most of us here mean by "extensive reading".

I have never been a particularly quick reader, but occasionally I will surprise myself, and when I think about it more carefully, what has happened is probably not that I've actually read any quicker. I've probably just read more consistently, and in longer chunks, so I've got through the book more quickly than if I'd allowed myself to break it up into smaller chunks with longer breaks in between. And this was probably because the book seized my imagination.

I can relate to your comment about looking up one word in a reading session. Just recently I've found myself consciously forcing myself not to whip out my smart phone or go up to my computer to look something up. I know that if I once weaken, that will be it, and I'll be looking up every doubtful word.
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steyyan
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Re: good silent reading rate for L2

Postby steyyan » Mon Jun 06, 2016 8:52 am

I read about 25-30 pages an hour (never counted words) in Norwegian, German and English, although that doesn't mean I'm equally good at those, but rather that it's not the language that's the bottleneck anymore.

In Spanish, it's more like 20, and in my others, it's about 10-15.
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Montmorency
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Re: good silent reading rate for L2

Postby Montmorency » Tue Jun 07, 2016 1:53 am

The following is actually about L1 reading, but for what it's worth:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35261648

"How could I read more books?
By Hannah Sander
BBC News Magazine"
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Re: good silent reading rate for L2

Postby zenmonkey » Mon May 29, 2017 6:42 pm

reineke wrote:"Optimal rates for processing prose are around 300 words per minute; and for fluent adult readers this is constant, regardless of the difficulty of the text (Carver, 1982, 1983, 1990).


Why it is always important to go to the source of research:

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... r_Flexible

A 14% change (on average) related to difficulty of text would not suggest to me that reading rate is constant.
And typical =!= optimal.
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Re: good silent reading rate for L2

Postby Cavesa » Mon May 29, 2017 7:29 pm

sfuqua wrote:I guess it's kind of a dumb question, but do many people read at the same speed in their L2 that they read in their L1?


I can't give you wpm numbers, but I'll measure my reading speed and share it. It would be interesting.

But I can answer the question with pages per hour number. It is less precise, but it is something, the pages are the "usual" smaller format. And the data is a bit older. These are the numbers I use, when I need to make any estimates, such us whether one book will be enough for a journey, or I should bring two with me.
Czech and English: 50 pages per hour
French: 40, perhaps more now.
Italian: around 30.
I strive to read just as comfortably in my target languages as in my native one. That means not only comprehension, but as well speed, as it is important for enjoyment of the text. I like the idea of "tunnel vision" in reading, I think it is very true and I notice it all the time while studying (medicine textbooks)

I find it extremely weird that the reading speed should be constant. It is definitely not so for me, it depends on the text a lot. I'm gonna look later at that research, thanks for the link.

And thanks for the other links, to the relation reading and spoken fluency, that is an interesting point of view.
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Re: good silent reading rate for L2

Postby Ani » Tue May 30, 2017 8:26 am

I've noticed lately that I read exactly the same speed in L2 as L1. The text very much matters in both languages though. I almost always have a lighter read going on concurrently with a technical read. A fluff novel I can read about 60+ pages a hour, a denser novel might be more like 40-50 depending on how much stopping to think I feel like doing, sometimes as low as 30/hr if there is something really good to think about. Technical books vary but I am reading two on the same subject right now, one English one French. I usually only last 30 minutes per session but my progress translates to 10-15 pg/hr.
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