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.