Don't read aloud to yourself. Generally, reading aloud to yourself does not help you study more effectively. If you move your lips while you read, you're not reading efficiently. If you read aloud or move your lips while you're reading, you are reading slowly, so stop moving your lips. Try putting a finger over your lips. Your finger will remind you not to move your lips. Make an effort to read faster and retain more. After a while, you'll be surprised how little effort it will take.
Getting back to reading and how we learn, one of the biggest reasons why we learned to read incredibly slow in the first place is that as a child in school, we learned to read by sounding out the words. When we pronounce the words, we have to read with the tongue. Our tongue can only pronounce about 200 to 400 words a minute. According to the 'latest' research, our memory is not stored in our tongue.
People talk to themselves in 2 ways, by:
· Vocalizing, which is the actual moving of your lips as you read
· Subvocalizing, which is talking to yourself in your head as you silently read
Both of these will slow you down to the point in which you find that you can't read any faster than you can speak. Speech is a relatively slow activity; for most, the average speed is about 250 wpm.
Chunk Four Words
Humans speak one word at a time, and not four words at the same time. Chunking the phrase “speed reading is necessary,” we get: speedreadingisnecessary. With this, sub-vocalization is reduced, thus requiring us to pronounce a four-word phrase to a single word.
Chunking is the process of looking at groups of words using our peripheral vision. The more we take in words simultaneously, say 4 to 5 words at a time, the more we ruin the pronunciation of words…until, eventually, sub-vocalization is totally distorted.
Use of a Pen or Finger
Using a pen or a finger as a reading tool is actually optional rather than necessary. In fact, some experts discourage this artificial way of pacing oneself. According to them, following a pen, finger, or any other tool moving across a page with your eyes while reading could make it impossible to grasp everything you ought to read because everything becomes a blur! Isn’t it that absorbing larger chunks of words per line at a time is actually the idea behind developing your reading speed?
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